Cardiatrics

A case of when technology wasn't the answer: Increasing user usage of a heart disease prevention program.
My Contribution
I led the research and role out of a solution that helped the company increase usage among their users base.
Business Overview
Cardiatrics is heart disease prevention program aimed at identifying an individual’s risk of heart disease and reducing that risk. The approach combines a clinical assessment of an individual's risk of heart disease with a personalized lifestyle change program delivered by dedicated doctor and health coach team. Cardiatrics uses a proprietary mobile health app and web software as a service to connect patients with their doctor and health coaches, and track their health and lifestyle metrics.
The Business Problem
Doctors weren't actually using the software
Low user usage ratings
The business relied heavily on incentivizing physicians to use the platform for their own patients. Cardiatrics offered the infrastructure for physicians to start helping manage their patient’s chronic issues and risk of heart disease. However, the company found that there were some major user compliance issues when it came to doctors actually using the online system.

Some physicians were not signing up patients altogether, while others were not completely keying in the needed patient’s medical information into Cardiatrics’ system. This left health coaches with incomplete data, making it difficult for them to personalize a patient’s lifestyle change plan.
A preview of the system in question
User Research & Insights
To understand the barriers to usage, it was vital to properly define the problem before jumping to solutions.To do that, I visited our current Cardiatrics doctor’s clinic for an observational study and approached other physicians for face-to-face interviews.The research revealed many insightful pitfalls with technology provided to doctors.
“Listen, it’s great, but I just don’t have the time..”
  • 85% of doctors interviewed said that they wanted to offer the program to patients. However, the was system’s patient medical forms were lengthy and they simply did not have the time to use it.
“Yet another system…”
  • By simply observing the day in a life of a doctor, I noticed doctors were already using an Electronic Health Record System (EHR) to enter a lot of the same patient medical information the Cardiatrics system required. Because of this, doctors would have to key in the same information into two separate systems.
Pen and Paper - a doctor’s best friend
  • Doctors would very often default to pen and paper note taking during a consultation with a patient. Upon asking why, doctors said sometimes they just need the reliability & flexibility pen and paper provides. Online systems are great, but sometimes rigid with its input.
Bedside manner
  • Doctors also mentioned that using their computers to key in medical information was simply not good bedside manner when trying to connect with patients – especially when asking them more sensitive information about their health and lifestyle.
Based on my observations, doctors had many established processes they already had to follow. Cardiatrics just did not fit into their usual way of doing things seamlessly enough. So I set out to look at the usual processes doctors and physicians carried out, and ended up finding one process in particular that proved to be a useful tool Cardiatrics could possibly replicate.
Stripping all the tech from our process
‍(well, almost all).
Doctors are busy and getting them to change their habits with yet another rigid, lengthy online form was not only impossible, but also bad design.They had their own EHR systems to deal with, and Cardiatrics could never replace it – nor could we affordably synchronize to all the different systems used. So we brought our process back-to-basics for doctors by leveraging on their already familiar specialist referral process.
The best part? It was affordable and quick to implement.
The Proposed Solution
We sorted out the information that health coaches truly required from patients versus what was simply “nice-to-have”. I then distilled these questions into an easy to fill in paper referral form that doctors could pass to their clinic staff to digitize.
Assumptions, Risk & Testing
Although the proposed solution was a feasible hypothesis, we had to understand the assumptions, the risks and of course, test it.
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‍Assumption #1: Doctors would agree to let Cardiatrics train clinic staff to upload our referral form.

Assumption #2: Clinic staff have the time, and are competent enough to scan and upload.

Risk #1: Referral forms that the clinic staff scanned posed a privacy issue if not properly managed on the clinic’s desktops.
Upon testing the hypothesis, we found that more doctors were pleased with the process. They were also more than willing to have their clinic staff help with the process.
After implementing the solution, Cardiatrics saw an increase in doctors actually signing up. patients and using the service.
And although it was effective, we did see our fair share of obstacles, requiring us to adjust some aspects of the solution (for example, finding the time to train clinic staff was difficult because they were constantly busy. Accordingly, we had to make special arrangements to train clinic staff after working hours).
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Reflection
In a world obsessed with implementing tech solutions in the pursuit of innovation, the case of Cardiatrics was a brilliant illustration of the different ways in which businesses can innovate based on their unique objectives.

There are many ways in which we could have solved Cardiatrics’ problem – the solution outlined just turned out to be one that best suited Cardiatrics’ needs. It was a quick solution to test and implement while saving cost and increasing usage.
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Looking back, I would have tried to further develop the solution to address:
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Let's connect

I am always looking to connect with like minded individuals and for feedback on my thoughts and work. Feel free to email me at

sarah9393@gmail.com