How We Work
Redefining Honor’s care delivery platform from human to system led
I led the reframe of a core business problem, creating and evangelizing a long-term vision that addressed root platform issues, enhancing Honor's ability to deliver high-quality care at scale.
My journeyResearch > System mapping > Problem reframe > Collaborative vision > Driving two dual workstreams > Converged MVP
My rolePrinciple product designer leading end-end design, strategy & research.
Team structure2 designers, 6 engineers, 2 data scientists, 1 researcher, 3 Care Team leaders, Product Director & CPO
Timeline6+ months
Impact this made
Client retention12% ↑
Increase in client retention over a three month period
Efficiency22% ↑
488hr/wk via automation, prioritization of work & reduced agency coordination
Care Pro Preparedness8% ↑
Increase in visit satisfaction and client retention
OrganizationNew platform pod &
evolved client manager role
Problem space
Honor is the world’s largest home care network, providing nearly 1 million hours of care weekly through its advanced care platform. In 2021, Honor acquired Home Instead, the largest home health care franchise network in the U.S.
Post-acquisition, some agencies were hesitant to transfer their operations to Honor due to their deep client relationships, causing inefficiencies as they continued to co-manage operations. This remained a challenging space that Honor continuously tried to solve for and in late 2023 it became a main focus area for the product development team. I came in as the lead designer for this space and was tasked with spearheading efforts to significantly reduce manual coordination in order to effectively integrate more agencies into the platform.
Honor's user ecosystem
DiscoveryMy drive to solve for root cause
I drove the research and discovery for this initiative by first assessing our past learnings from features and process changes we had developed in the past. I then developed, led and synthesized 12+ interview and shadow sessions across our internal operations & agency partners. In addition, I paired with our data teams to validate and quantify time spent in the coordination space.
Insights started to emerge
Broken connections
60% of the care team work is untracked, most coordination & client updates are done via external tooling creating gaps in understanding.
Inconsistencies
60% of the care team work is untracked, most coordination & client updates are done via external tooling creating gaps in understanding.
Lack of trust
Agencies are over-involved in care delivery because we have not proven that we can consistently deliver a good experience.
Lack of prioritization
20% of time is spent simply figuring out what to do next, causing lags in proactive care, coordination & real time updates.
Something felt off…
Coordination & visibility felt like a symptom of a larger problem and we’re missing the critical perspective from the most important voice - our clients.
The pivotAligning leadership on the real problem
As my insights began to emerge, it became obvious that our customer voice was missing from the research. This much needed side of the story could inform what aspects of dual operations either negatively or positively impacted client trust and satisfaction with Honor.
I paired with our head UXR (the amazing, Rose Kue) for a deep dive into our client service experience — something Honor had fundamentally never had the capacity to do, but was a critical unlock in my discovery work.
Our study uncovered that not only were a large subset of clients unfamiliar with the Honor & HomeInstead partnership, many were deeply unsatisfied with their new care delivery service through Honor, specifically, the lack or personalization and high-touch care that naturally might not come from a 24/7 operational company.
Snippet of our Client Service Experience synthesis
I do, I think that this whole company should be rearranged to make it more personal and more safe for these elderly people.
— Family member of client
Along with these new findings, I visually articulated how complex our system & operational model was — and the overreaching impact it’s having on our client satisfaction and retention.
This helped me to draw emphasis to the system level nuances & defects we have — highlighting those as direct results of inefficiency and loss in client retention.
System map I created to articulate key challenges in our coordination patterns between unique agencies & central operations team
New problem…
Our distributed team & platform can not handle quality client care delivery at scale.
CollaborationHow (customer journey, something)
To convey broad concepts of the future we were tasked with coming up with a vision what quality at scale meant. (this is not good)
Images taken during my 2 day facilitated brainstorm session with other design leads
Here is some messaging around getting buy in and collaborating with other design leads. This was a system wide intiative to fix and I needed to make sure that together we were definying system wide defects and such. Northstar opportunity space:
VisionProposal for the future of Honor
Enabling the system to generate and drive work across the platform
By analyzing data, inputs & communications, the system is able to automate most work with little review. The rare human driven work that remains is proactive, high-touch & delivers at the most impactful moments of the client journey.
Ensuring the right people, get the right work at the right time
The system will designate which player does what & when, with appropriate back-ups, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. The rare things that need human intervention should be personal — driving a great client experience.
Orchestrating and empowering users to guide their own care delivery
The system will designate which player in the does what & when, with appropriate back-ups, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Making operations no longer a bottleneck — but backup support
Shifting the weight of the work from operational led to system led
By emphasizing and highlighting the potential reduction in operational costs with this long term approach, it was easier for leadership to accept further investment & resources in this area.
“quote here”….
Iteration & developmentValidating our MVP
To incrementally test how this new framework could move us closer to our goals we broke the work into two core work streams:
01 Developing ‘assigned units of work’
Our goal with this workstream was to evolve and develop an initial proof of concept for testing with internal users. I collaborated closely with engineering leads to define the data model for the new framework, while also creating visual concepts to guide the other designer on how this framework could manifest in both our internal and external products.
02 High touch service model changes
One of our key insights kajfdlkajdfkjasdfklasjfklasdfjklasdfjklasdfjklsadfjkasdjflksadfjalskdfjsalkfjsakldfjksaldfjaklsdjfkadsfj
Applying these learnings
Add in the success rate from the pilot + marrying the two concepts together we used the pilot to indentify which workflows were critical in scaling…
Pre & post visit
Manual Care Pro preparation
OutcomeCascading changes to our internal & external platform driven by the ‘How we Work’ model.
Systematically driving & prioritizing a care team member’s day (reword)
The core building block of the framework is a centralized work queue which systematically creates & prioritizes work into a single dynamic queue for an operational member and eliminates the need to support nearly 5+ unique dashboards that were most commonly referenced. This queue would house the initial high-touch workflows we built out.
Guided workflow for efficient task completion
Operational members were empowered to work through these select tasks in one centralized view versus navigating across 12+ pages on the platform to investigate, prioritize, document & complete the work.
Supporting centralization by modularizing data needs
We modularized contextual data that was most commonly needed to complete the initial workflows and ~80% of anticipated future workflows on the platform.
Might not need this?!
Add in care plan…
human in the loop (only when real changes need to be made)
Alleviating operational bottlenecks by promoting self-service workflows
We redesigned our existing caregiver visit preparation workflow to increase engagement & preparedness of visits — driving better care delivery and client experiences. This was our first external workflow using the new framework and significantly reduced the need for operations to manually prepare caregivers via phone call or text messaging.
Ensuring back-up support in care delivery
The system is now able to detect if key workflows aren’t externally completed by due date and will automatically re-assign internally to our care operations team to ensure that quality care is always delivered.
