My Health Online

Enhancing patient experience through simplified navigation and usability of high impact features within MHO

How it started  
I began this project as part of Sutter Health’s company-wide Innovation Challenge.

Although this wasn’t a formal design challenge, I approached it through a design thinking lens. A few months after submitting my initial ideas, Sutter’s Consumer Strategy and Digital Access team reached out. They had reviewed my designs and wanted to learn more and that initial conversation quickly grew into a collaborative effort to bring the concepts to life. From there, I was invited to share prototypes, research insights, and recommendations, and ultimately help guide improvements to the MHO app experience.

Problem Space  

Patients using the MHO app struggle to find key features like scheduling appointments due to buried navigation. This confusion leads to missed actions, user frustration, and added burden on hospital staff who must follow up manually.

Goal

Increase patient engagement and reduce operational inefficiencies by improving navigation and usability of high impact features within MHO, particularly scheduling appointments.

My Role

I led the design to improve MHO app's navigation experience. This included identifying usability gaps, analyzing competitive patterns, gathering stakeholder and user input, and designing prototypes that reimagined key task flows like scheduling appointments, all within existing platform constraints.

Discovering the gaps in My Health Online

I gathered feedback from managers and patients and after that I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the current MHO app.
To broaden my understanding, I also explored how Sutter’s competitors approached similar challenges, studying their navigation patterns, language, and visual hierarchy.
Carbon Health
TelaDoc
One Medical
Kaiser
All platforms have a tab bar, and each of these platforms features a clear layout, engaging visuals, and some degree of personalization, allowing users to quickly locate what they need.

Key Insight

The main challange  with MHO was unclear labels and buried navigation. Patients couldn’t easily find or recognize core actions, making important tasks like scheduling appointments hard to complete.

Defining which problem is worth fixing first?

Although it seemed like a straightforward task, scheduling involved multiple appointment types, each with a different user flow (e.g., primary care, lab tests, imaging). Through conversations with lab managers, I discovered that lab appointments were the most misunderstood.

Initial concepts