How we made this: the Tia Well-Woman 2.0

Think back to March 2020 — the gravity of the pandemic was beginning to settle in. It was clear that the Covid-19 pandemic was going to be impacting us directly, and to leave long-lasting changes on our society and, specifically, on healthcare.

Problem identification

At Tia, we made the decision to close our Flatiron clinic doors on 3/17 and transitioned all our services to be virtual. Within 5 days, we had shifted our entire business from living within 4 walls on 23rd street to living in the cloud. In these 5 days, we set up processes, trained providers, and rethought our entire patient experience to make sure that we were upholding our care principles in a virtual world.

What happened after this was remarkable — providers & patients were screaming from the rooftops that they wanted more access virtually and that they wanted it from Tia. We saw our virtual visits grow over 3x in the first month. At this time, the services we were delivering virtually were only those that were “easy” to shift from the clinic to virtual -- think sick visits and non-physical consults.

Quickly we saw a massive gap -- access to preventative care was gone.

At Tia, we know the importance of preventative care and were closely monitoring the impact that we were seeing as a society from patients not having access to preventative care. Over 54% of women were postponing care due to Covid and 60% of primary care providers agreed that this delay in preventative care was going to lead to an increase in preventable illness for patients.

Our preventive care services at Tia are entirely underpinned by the Well Woman Exam -- a once-a-year appointment that combines gynecology & primary care annuals. 80% of our active members had this appointment in their first year, and for over 50% of patients, it is their first experience with Tia.

We knew we had an obligation to our patients to continue to deliver preventative care and adapt the way we were doing it to accommodate them. So, a cross-functional team of tech, clinical, and brand experts hit the (virtual) whiteboard to rethink our core service.

Half n' Half

As we began to set out on this problem, we were looking for taking the Well Woman Experience that we people knew & loved from the “IRL” clinic space to the “URL” (virtual) clinic space. At this stage, we had three key insights:

For those of you who have recently gotten an annual primary care or gynecology exam, you’ll recall that these exams have two fairly distinct parts. First, the provider reviews the patient’s health record with the patient and does a short consultation about the state of the patient’s health. From there, they will do a series of physical examinations, which can include everything from a pap smear and a breast exam to an ear & nose & eye check, depending on your age, gender, and other risk factors.

Take the part where the patient is talking to their provider, and have them do this virtually. This allowed providers to understand the patient’s risk factors, determine the urgency of their physical exams, and ensure that the patient was only getting the physical examinations that they needed.

Thinking we had figured it out, we began to plan for a “Half n’ Half” Well-Woman — half online, half offline.

Tia Well Woman 2.0: Service Design

At Tia, we believe in constantly listening to our patients & providers when designing products. We believe that if we listen with open ears, they’ll tell us what they need.

As a next step to bring this Half n Half to life, we began reviewing the feedback that we had received on the Well Woman experience we had been delivering to date and did roundtables with patients & providers on the new experiences we were delivering.

We heard one thing loud & clear: Tia can do better.

While the increased access to virtual preventative care was enticing, we repeatedly heard that patients wanted a deeper understanding of the risk factors that providers identified in the visit and a holistic plan on how to address them.

To meet & exceed our patient’s expectations, we needed to truly uplevel the quality of the consultation portion of the Well Woman experience we had designed. This involved two big changes.

Delivering patients a Care Plan: We heard loud and clear: Tia patients want to take ownership of their health journey. They want a plan, and they want to be a part of designing it. In the new iteration of the Well Woman, every patient would get a documented Care Plan that had the exact plan they had made with their provider. A Tia Care Coordinator would deliver it to the patient via our proprietary chat tool.

Investing heavily in provider training. Over the following month, we spent over 20 hours training providers. This spanned everything from how to review Tia’s health record to how to create a Care Plan to very specific trainings on various interventions that would be essential for our patient population.

Tia Well Woman 2.0: Bringing it to life

We’d designed the product experience. The service had been solidified, and now we needed to bring it to our patients.

Experience & communications

This offering simply didn’t exist anywhere else. How would we explain it to people?

The brand team went to work on identifying the key areas we would use to explain this new experience to patients. Ultimately, we landed on creating new naming conventions and standardizing visualizations of the Care Plans as the tools to explain this to members.

The team compiled this into a webpage that took patients through the experience end-to-end.

Operationalizing the experience

We had introduced an entirely new service line: for one single patient journey, there were multiple providers and administrative staff working behind the scenes to ensure a smooth experience.

We doubled down on documentation and training, particularly around the parts of the experience where patients were moving from one step to another — what we like to call at tia “baton passes.”

Bringing the product into the technology platform

The online-and-offline experience required a new tech experience, particularly as it related to booking an appointment. We knew that the next experience had to deliver on two key requirements:

1. Education: it’s a new service, we needed to use this as an opportunity to explain the experience of booking
2. Continuous journey: we needed to show that they were booking the beginning of a journey of appointments, not a one-off appointment.

Together, our tech product, product design, and engineering team worked together to shift to a new booking experience that delivered on this requirement.

It’s just the beginning

In June 2020, Tia’s Well-Woman 2.0 was introduced to the world.

Patients were thrilled — the new service had both allowed for access to preventative care and created an experience that had up-leveled their preventative care experience.

Providers were thrilled-- by creating time for providers to focus on understanding the patient's health history & goals, they were given the space to work collaboratively with their patients to create a truly holistic plan for how to get or keep their patients healthy.

Launching the Tia Well-Woman 2.0 experience was a huge step forward in delivering on the Tia Care Model. It opened our eyes to the power of combining online and offline experiences and gave us even more insight into what females really want from their care providers. We’re excited to continue to develop the Well-Woman — keep an eye out for what’s to come!