Digital Transformation — UX Strategy, Patient & Provider Experience

The Challenge

Sentara Health engaged me to help define and drive the UX strategy for a large-scale digital transformation initiative. The work spanned patient and provider-facing web properties, internal tools, and the foundational design system needed to support a consistent experience across a complex, multi-brand health system.

Current-state sitemapS

I started out by conducting a review of the information architecture of all three of the web properties, Sentara.com, MyChart and OptimaHealth. I created current-state sitemaps for those, as well as for additional experiences for providers, patients and 3rd-party vendors. The following example shows the most high-level sitemap with the main entry points into the three web properties.

Patient and Provider Personas

I worked closely with the marketing team at Sentara Health to refine a set of personas for patients and providers that were grounded in a range of user research that had been conducted prior to this project. The personas highlight the following key aspects: top tasks, challenges, healthcare / information needs, and technology used as well as technical expertise.

USER journey #1: PATIENT AND PROVIDER

For this project, the team decided to go with scenarios and basic-looking user journeys that helped to align the team and focus on the key aspects. The first example shows the user journey of a patient scheduling an appointment with a provider.

USER JOURNEY #2: PATIENT AND PHARMACIST

This example shows the user journey of a patient refilling their medication by scanning a barcode, the pharmacist receiving the request and the patient receiving confirmation messages.

Wireframes — refill by scan flow

This shows wireframes for the second user journey above. The wireframes went through several rounds of iterations and were eventually used to create clickable prototypes for user testing.

Final designS

On this project the final designs followed the wireframes very closely in regard to layout and design patterns.

My Approach

• Audit existing digital properties and identify experience gaps across patient touchpoints.
• Conduct stakeholder interviews, patient and provider journey mapping workshops.
• Define information architecture and content strategy for the redesigned web presence.
• Create wireframes, prototypes, and design specifications aligned to accessibility standards.
• Work closely with marketing and visual design to support consistent, scalable delivery across teams.

Deliverables

• Current-state audit and experience gap analysis
• Patient and provider personas and journey maps
• Information architecture analysis, current and future-state site maps
• Annotated wireframes
• Prototypes for user testing