Context: A New Healthcare Marketplace

I was approached by a venture capital firm to give life and thought to an idea they had come up with. The idea was to create a healthcare marketplace that featured their doctors as well as apps that they would partner with. These apps could be anything from weight loss apps like NOOM mental health apps like Headspace. On top of featuring doctors and healthcare apps they would have informational content to help potential patients understand some of the things they are feeling.

Objective: Help Patients Connect with Doctors

The goal of this marketplace was threefold. The first and and main goal was to drive new patients to this hypothetical healthcare system. The second goal was to partner with growing healthcare app marketplace. Things like weight loss and mental health apps are exploding in popularity. Instead fighting for patients with these new apps the thought was to feature trusted apps on the marketplace and let patients decide what is best of them. The third and final goal was to offer information and be a trusted source for any medical treatments they offer.

Process: Research, Organize, and Create a Happy Path

The first step I took was to research other healthcare marketplaces. To be able to bring this one to life I needed to understand what else was out there. I needed to understand what they did, how they did it, what they offered, and how they structured themselves. While looking at other healthcare marketplaces I realized there’s a pretty well drawn out architecture they all share.

Find: The architecture that seemed the most common was one that started with either an open ended search or a guided search. The open ended search allowed patients to enter symptoms into a search bar to find a doctor. The guided search allowed patients to pick from a list of symptoms or procedures to being the search. Both lead to a search results page with a list of doctors someone could choose.

Topics: If you didn’t search for a symptom or doctor the next route someone could take was drilling down into a popular topic. These pages would often feature a brief description of the topic, potentially some blog-like posts, and normally featured doctors in those areas of expertise.

Doctors: Each doctor registered in the marketplace would have their own page where we would display a short biograpy, their location, the treatments and conditions they specialize in, and topic pages that give brief overviews of health topics.

Account: These marketplaces also all have a login with some sort of profile that holds all of your interactions with the marketplace. Things like favorited doctors, visits, and potentially even patient files all live there. This was considered, but ultimately not designed as part of selling the idea.

I took all of these things and created a site architecture, representative pages for each category, and a small prototype to showcase what this marketplace could be.