Northwell Health dPx

dPx Success by the Numbers

The dPx initiative delivers the ultimate in care through connectedness, accessibility, and personalization.

With over 20,000 app downloads, 60,000 registered dPx users, 8.5 minutes of staff time saved per digital billing transaction, 80,000 hours of staff time saved, and a 5x reduction in content creation costs, the digital patient experience reimagining has been tremendously successful. 

Hands-on research was crucial to creating relevant and effective solutions for Northwell Health’s dPx. Members of the Phase2 UX team shadowed patients, staff, and physicians, observing real-time behaviors in patient check-ins, follow-up, billing, and support. 

After several observational research sessions and gaining an understanding of all touchpoints, Phase2 produced a comprehensive report and roadmap to guide the prioritization and direction of the digital experience enhancements. 

Built on the findings of a thorough UX audit, Phase2 created a digital style guide and accompanying component-based design system to enable intentional, high-quality, branded experiences at scale. The style guide, based on Northwell Health’s brand identity, translates their newly established design elements into a digital format. Now, teams can easily grab design elements from the digital style guide and build new pages while maintaining brand integrity across their ever-growing ecosystem.

Northwell Health’s app provides consumers full control of their healthcare journey in an on-brand and industry-leading user experience. The app delivers the essentials of a frictionless experience including provider search, booking and managing an appointment, pre-appointment form filling, medical record access, and billing.

Searching & Booking

Finding the right provider can be stressful during an already trying time. To create Northwell Health’s best-in-class search experience, Phase2 worked alongside internal teams to develop a middleware data management layer (DML) to enable collection, cleaning, and augmentation of data. With the DML, any patient search on any of Northwell Health’s channels is no longer limited by what’s stored on a third-party doctor’s, specialty center’s, or practice’s system. The result is an aggregation that synthesizes information from many sources to display the most accurate results.

A Better Billing Experience

To build a better billing experience, we started with interviews and usability testing. Phase2 redesigned both paper and digital statements, replacing medical and technical jargon with care-based language and a focus on just the critical information. 
Northwell Health’s online payment centers (website and app) are now a one-stop solution for consumers to pay their bill, access billing and payment history, and find financial assistance.

Balancing Access, Personalization, and Security

We had to balance the competing priorities of greater patient access, personalization, and information sharing with security concerns and HIPAA/HITECH compliance. Phase2 developed a layered approach that unlocks a deeper experience with each level of identity verification:

• Anonymous users can find care, read physician profiles and reviews, and pay bills. 
• Once users have a verified Northwell account, they can manage profile information, receive personalized content, and access the native mobile app. 
• For full access, the app is integrated with Experian to verify identity and link a digital account profile to the correct record. At this stage of verification, consumers can view their record data including past and future appointments, outstanding bills, and completed forms. 

The entire system is anchored by a seamless biometric login and single sign-on (SSO) system.

 

Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York, is embracing these challenges and turning them into a competitive advantage. As a forward-thinking employer of over 80,000 healthcare workers with a service area of nearly 11 million people, Northwell Health teamed up with Phase2 to drive a multi-year, multi-project reimagining of the entire digital patient experience (dPx).