Overview
Health on the Spot
Emergency rooms are often crowded, intimidating, expensive places to be. When used for their original intentions –– to offer rapid medical assistance in emergencies––they provide an essential service in the medical industry. But according to the American Medical Association, 40-55% of emergency room visits could be avoided if patients could speak to a physician over the phone before deciding how to get care.
Why have emergency care facilities become overcrowded and often misused for minor injuries or illnesses that primary care physicians should treat?
As things are changing in healthcare, people are suddenly being asked to pay for all of this. Insurance companies are saying, 'Well, you know, it really wasn't an emergency.' Or, 'You still have a $1,500 deductible or co-pay for emergency care.' People have a financial incentive to decide if this is an emergency. And who better to tell them if it's an emergency than an emergency physician?
If you can call an emergency physician or any physician and talk to them for three or four minutes, we can tell you in the first 30 seconds if you need to go to the emergency room or not. If you do, you're encouraged to go. If you don't, we just saved you a whole pile of money and a lot of time."
The Challenge
Before out-of-the-box telemedicine software existed, we had to create an easy-to-use iOS native application for patients to speak to healthcare providers. Nurses or Nurse Practitioners then educated and gave healthcare resource lists based on need.
The Goal
- Connecting the community with telemedicine technology to achieve healthcare resources. Create UX/UI telemedicine native iOS app with a cross-functional team including project managers, staff, and engineers.
My Role
My participation in this project was to design a native application for iOS in collaboration with a team of full-stack developers. I created a video in After Effects explaining the process in English and Spanish.
Duration
- 3 months
Tools
- Sketch, Adobe XD, Adobe After Effects, Sublime Text, Transmit
Video Spot
Final Results
- 164 lives touched during test pilot health fair
- 5 unique patients contacted with potential savings of $30, 705
- Median ER visits / unique patient = 5
- Average cost per visit: $300
- 66% have not come back to the ER since being provided a community resource list
- 14% enrolled in insurance or visited a clinic
Project Learning
The team quickly transitioned to Twilio for voice services after discovering how seamlessly Twilio's Super Network could scale with them and their positive response when testing Twilio's solution with existing customers. We soon realized Twilio could also be the solution they needed for video and video recordings. We moved to Twilio API video based on the positive experience we had working with Twilio for telephony and recognizing the efficiency they could provide for video encounters.
Next Steps