Most people who think they have a substance use problem wait weeks for an assessment

The Problem

The delay in assessment means weeks waiting to receive treatment and other services. In terms of many people trying to stay sober and engaged with recovery, this might as well be an eternity. The will to change is often fragile and must be met with urgency.

Our incredible team of clinicians were able to turn assessments around in 24-48 hours instead, but the need was always greater than we could fill. This meant we were leaving people unhelped and revenue on the table.

We had to increase assessment throughput without sacrificing clinical quality or the experience of the patient or clinician.

My Role: As the only designer, I took this work from discovery through dev support. With the team running lean, I served as my own BA and PM on this one too.

Skills Used: Design strategy, competitive analysis, information architecture, sketching, process flows, UI design

Duration: 3 months

Ok, That’s Just a Giant Form

In its most basic UI terms, this 45 minute assessment is more or less a giant form. That comes with all the usual considerations of a lengthy form—showing progress, robust error handling, preventing data loss—but also some more specific considerations:

  • Do clinicians and clients move through the assessment front to back? Not always. A skilled interviewer is flexible and conversational.

  • How do you know when it’s complete? Every field must be filled. None are optional, but many are conditional.

  • Is the whole thing completed in one sitting? No, usually two, first with the client and then charting without the client later that day.

  • What happens once it’s done? It must be signed, reviewed for quality, and shared with relevant treatment centers or agencies.

More Details, Less Documentation

The clinicians were looking to save time, and so was I. There was tremendous potential in understanding and improving each section of the assessment. However, I didn’t want to spend my limited time building and maintaining thirteen pages of form fields.

Instead, I created a spreadsheet to document the form. This served as both a discussion aid with subject matter experts and a requirements document for the engineers. I paired this with component-level docs and two page examples in Figma to provide a full design reference.

Sharing Allows Caring

Health record interoperability seems to work mostly at two ends of a spectrum: Total integration and PDFs. With hundreds of small partner orgs, the latter was our arena.

While talking with our Assessment Program Manager, I had a realization: Hundreds of partner organizations means hundreds of opportunities to build our reputation through professional, easy-to-use PDF exports.

Armed with this idea, I advocated for a greater investment in polishing these documents.

In many ways, this was a first draft, without bells or whistles. One thing rang out loud and clear, though: Assessments that took 45-60 minutes were down to 20 with the new tool. Not a bad first pass.

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Addressing Child Mental Health