From Three Platforms to One Patient Experience
The Challenge
PatientNow provides practice management software that helps independent medical providers run their practices and engage with patients. A private equity firm acquired PatientNow and combined it with two other businesses, aiming to build a single, best-in-class practice management software platform for the aesthetic and elective procedures industry. The goal was to bring together electronic medical records, patient engagement and marketing tools, and photography and image management into one product.
PatientNow’s leadership team was new, having been in place only about six months when the integration began. Rather than treat the merger as a purely technical exercise, they wanted a clear, shared vision for what the unified platform should deliver to their business and to their customers.
The goal was to bring together electronic medical records, patient engagement & marketing tools, and photography & image management into one product.
The Collaboration
Forge Harmonic recommended a three-phase strategic design approach — Discovery, Future Narrative, and Concept Design — to help PatientNow move past a technical integration and build real consensus around what the combined platform should be. PatientNow selected Forge Harmonic in part for its healthcare experience: the team understood PatientNow's problem from the start, had solved similar challenges before, and was hands-on throughout the engagement.
Discovery started with PatientNow’s own leadership team and then extended to conversations with PatientNow’s customers about how they ran their practices, engaged patients, and used their software day to day. That research surfaced the project's defining insight: PatientNow’s software served providers, but its real job was to help those providers deliver a better patient experience.
Forge Harmonic turned that insight and the rest of the findings into storyboards of what the future experience could look like and tested them with the same customers. That feedback was translated into the actual product workflows PatientNow’s unified platform needed to deliver.
"We need to focus on the patient workflow almost as much as, if not more than, the provider workflow. If the patient is happy, then everyone is happy."
— Josemaria Dolores, Chief Technology Officer
The Results
Forge Harmonic delivered PatientNow’s "North Star Vision": a high-fidelity, interactive prototype of the all-in-one product, an information architecture diagram of how the three products came together, a user guide, a visual style guide, and recommendations for turning the vision into a real product.
That package gave Dolores what he needed to build internal alignment and bring a successful proposal to the board. Some team members who had initially been skeptical about bringing in outside help for user experience came around, too.
"There was a lot of validation in terms of what we already thought. Having that user experience made us see where we need to go," Dolores said.
The patient-workflow insights weren’t just theoretical. PatientNow began reorganizing its product backlog to prioritize patient engagement tools, like its patient portal, before the engagement had even finished.
With the vision approved, PatientNow brought Forge Harmonic back for the next phase of work: building the design system and detailed product design needed to bring the unified platform to life.
