University of California, San Francisco
Helping Patients & Providers Have Better Healthcare Conversations
Using mixed-methods research and service design to support shared decision-making between patients and providers.
Research Methods
Many healthcare decisions happen during conversations that last only a few minutes. Those conversations are shaped by both patients and providers.
Patients may be asked to understand unfamiliar medical information, consider deeply personal priorities, and make important choices within the constraints of a short appointment.
Providers bring medical expertise, but also their own assumptions, communication styles, and time pressures.
At UCSF, our team explored how research and technology could better support both sides of that conversation.
Understanding Patients
Many patients entered appointments without enough information, time, or opportunity to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own care.
Those conversations were also shaped by whether patients felt safe sharing honest information. Fear of judgment could make it harder for providers to understand what patients actually needed.
In the resource-constrained clinical settings where much of our work took place, those challenges were often compounded by broader power imbalances. Many patients were women, people of color, immigrants, or people navigating significant economic constraints.
How could we help patients better understand their options — and help providers better listen to their patients?
Supporting Better Patient-Provider Conversations
As Research Project Manager, I conducted the end-to-end mixed-methods research and guided the development of the apps and websites that resulted from this research - from early discovery through implementation.
Together, we developed a decision-support app that helped patients clarify their priorities before appointments, while giving providers better insight into what mattered most to the patients and a conversation format where both voices would be heard.
Research informed not only the product itself, but also the workflows surrounding it so the technology could support (not replace) the clinical conversation.
When Implementation Changed the Problem
Implementation revealed a problem we hadn't fully anticipated.
Many patients arrived only minutes before their appointments. The tool may have been usable, but the surrounding workflow left little time to use it.
The problem wasn't the product. It was when, where, and how the product entered the service.
Rather than interpreting incomplete use as patient error, we treated it as another research question.
Working alongside clinics, we shortened parts of the experience, adapted clinical workflows, and explored sending the tool before appointments through text-message reminders. Implementation became another phase of research.
Across clinical sites, the work informed both the digital tool and the service surrounding it so the experience could better fit patients' lives and providers' constraints.
What Stayed With Me
This project changed how I think about innovation in healthcare.
Improving a product does not automatically improve the experience around it. Sometimes the greatest opportunity lies in the workflow, timing, or organizational processes that determine whether the product can be useful at all.
Since then, I've approached research by asking two questions: What do people need — and what do I need to consider about the surrounding context?