accuBook
Product Designer
accuRx, 2020
Overview
accuRx’s mission is to build a world-leading healthcare communication platform. Established in 2016, today over 98% of GP practices use accuRx to communicate with their patients.
Back in November 2020, with confirmation the NHS needed to be ready to start roll out the COVID-19 vaccinations in December, the NHS needed to prepare for rapid and effective delivery of the vaccine to millions of patients at the highest risk. accuRx decided to quickly pivot into delivering accuBook, a platform to allow GP practices and delivery sites to effectively and safely book and deliver COVID-19 vaccinations.
30M
Vaccination appointments booked to date in England
72%
Self-booked appointments
£16M
Saved in admin costs for self-booked appointments
My role
As the solo designer in a cross functional team, I was responsible for delivering and iterating every design and prototype.
I’ve worked closely to Alice, our User Researcher, contributing to writing discussion guides, running calls and summarising insight to engineers. I also worked alongside our PM Jen to prioritise pieces of work, and our Clinical Lead Lucy to ensure to avoid any clinical risk.
Timeline
Goal
accuBook aimed at helping vaccine programme providers to:
📱 Enable patient to self-book their COVID-19 vaccination
🚨 Automate recall and reminders processes
💯 Maximise uptake
💉 Minimise vaccine wastage through fast clinic set up
📊 Monitor data to inform public health campaign and supply chain
Users
🏥 Delivery sites
A GP practice in charge to set up clinics to deliver vaccines. They need to be able to set up clinics based on vaccine and staff capacity, and engage with inviting GP practices.
👩🏽⚕️ GP Practices
Each delivery site is linked to a number of local GP practices responsible for inviting patients according to the right age cohort and weeks since first vaccination, and monitor bookings and uptake.
👴🏻 Patients
Need to be able to being invited to their vaccination, and manage safely and easily their booking.
Research
First essential step for us was to reach out to our user to identify at best how we could help. We can rely on a very engaged community, who responded quickly and informatively to our queries on how we could help.
. A poll in our facebook community, and one of the first iterations of research with our users - Nov and Dec 2020
A really tricky part of building the accuBook MVP was that no one had run a COVID-19 vaccination clinic yet. Therefore it made our usual process of going out and researching this with our users really hard. We still did it, but some of the first conversations we had before anyone had run a vaccination clinic went a bit like this:
Q: “When you’re setting up your clinics, how far in advance are you going to know how much vaccine you’ll get”
A: “We’re not sure yet, we’re getting told soon”.
Q: “How are you thinking about your DNA (did not attend) rate and ensuring vaccines aren’t wasted?”
A: “We have no idea what the DNA rate will be yet. We’re thinking low? We’ll copy what we did for the flu and learn as we go”.
This meant we had to make many assumptions at the beginning. It was important to make sure we were documenting these, so that we could go back once we (and primary care at large) knew more about some of the specifics and amend what we were planning to do.
Story mapping
Our PM Jen ran a story mapping session involving some key stakeholders, and we came out with 5 user flows that would be necessary to build for our first iteration if we wanted to enable people to book themselves in from the start:
1️⃣ Setting up vaccination clinics and calculating how many appointments would be available for patients to book
2️⃣ Uploading a patient list and invite them in bulk to book in for their vaccines
3️⃣ Patients being able to book themselves in by choosing from available appointments
4️⃣ Manually booking patients without mobile numbers in, and following up with non-responders
5️⃣ Being able to see which patients are booked in for a given day to receive their vaccinations
. accuBook MVP user journey - Nov 2020
Design and testing
It was time to start designing. Having set ourselves a deadline of having a working version by Christmas, we built the above and shipped our MVP in less than 4 weeks. This meant we were in time for practices to use our software to invite and book in patients for their first vaccination deliveries.
. accuBook MVP - Dec 2020
Our MVP was ready to go in 4 weeks. Constant contact with our users, through testing and user support constantly steered us to iterate and improve our product.
Iterating
Between January and June 2021, accuBook went through continuous iterations, due to both changing requirements from NHS and different user needs. Our very simple MVP flow looked like this at the end!
Particular attention was given to our invite flow, that allows a practice to upload a list of patient and automatically send out an SMS with a booking link.
Our very first solution would allow, in agreement with NHS guidance, to:
-
Upload a list of patients and automatically invite them to book both their vaccinations.
On 30th Dec 2020, NHS guidance changed to give priority to first vaccinations, so we had to pivot to a system which would let users to:
-
Automatically invite to first vaccination
-
Monitor patients awaiting for second dose
-
Invite patients for second dose in the correct timeframe.
Because of this, our users needed a better, clearer way to manage their patient lists that could support different workflows so that every practice in the country could effectively deliver the vaccination programme.
. Invite flow - iterations
. Invite list - iterations
Other improvements that I was very keen to make in the product were sadly deprioritised due to the very extensive backlog our team had.
. Set up page - iterations (deprioritised)
Outcome and feedback
30M
Vaccination appointments booked to date in England
72%
of accuBook appointments were self-booked
£16M
Saved in admin costs for self-booked appointments
As of June 2022, accuBook helped booking ~ 30M COVID-19 vaccinations across England and Wales. It was my biggest achievement and privilege to be involved in this project, and to have worked alongside incredibly talented, brilliant and kind people.
Some feedback from our users 💚:
Q: "At the weekend we were offered 1000 vaccines at very short notice. We accepted knowing that we could use accuBook to get patients booked in and within an hour we had filled a clinic on a Sunday morning for the same day! Within 2 hours we were vaccinating vulnerable elderly patients.[..]1000 more people have now started their journey towards a safer life entirely because we could get them booked within a couple of hours!"