The Providence mobile app is the one-stop shop for everything Providence. It plays a central role in the health system’s efforts to improve the patient experience and drive operational efficiency through technology.

In March 2024, I joined the mobile app team as the lead designer for the Next Best Action (NBA) initiative. Our goal was to help patients proactively manage their care and complete important health tasks.

One of our key opportunities was improving the lab booking experience.

Patients lack clarity on when labs are ordered and where to go, leading to missed labs and increased clinic calls.

Some patients are unaware of the lab tests they need prior to an upcoming appointment. Others don’t know which lab agency their orders were sent to, such as LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics.

As a result, patients may miss required labs or arrive at lab locations without an order on file, leading to clinic calls and delays in care.

An end-to-end in-app lab booking experience.

Patients stay informed, take action, and complete their labs without needing to call their care team.

The LabCorp integration led to an improvement in lab completion rates.

Patients using the Providence app showed a slight increase in 7-day completion and a significant rise in 30-day completion compared to those using MyChart.

Ultimately, higher lab completion rates reflect progress toward our goal of improving the patient journey while easing the workload for care teams.

The path to launch was anything but linear. It involved collaborating with our mobile app vendor, navigating Labcorp’s capabilities, evolving priorities, technical constraints, and many design iterations.

The Providence mobile app is built on Praia’s consumer health platform. Praia was spun out of the Providence Digital Innovation Group in 2024.

As both a customer and close partner, we help define the product and design specifications for new features and then submit them to Praia for implementation.

Healthcare is a fragmented industry. Patients often interact with multiple hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, and labs.

To close these gaps, Providence is expanding its digital ecosystem through strategic partnerships with organizations that provide valuable services to patients.

In April 2024, our partner LabCorp shared that they were building a lab scheduling API — an opportunity that aligned with our goal of improving the lab experience in the Providence app.

Patients often lack clarity on when labs are ordered, which tests are needed, and where to go.

Roughly 10% of the time, doctors send lab orders to different agencies like LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics.

Our primary key performance indicator was lab completion rate, which is the percentage of patients who complete their lab orders within a specific timeframe. We tracked both 7-day and 30-day completion to measure short- and longer-term follow-through.

To support this goal, we scoped the MVP experience around two key actions: notifying the patient of new lab orders and making it easy to schedule. Since Providence works with three lab agencies, we needed to create an experience that scales across each one.

One of our early challenges was the uncertainty around Labcorp’s scheduling API. While they confirmed it was in development, we had no insight into what data it would require or return.

Given the unclear timeline and our target to launch by the end of June, we needed to move forward with a solution that worked within existing constraints. Early designs focused on a deep link experience, directing patients to each lab agency’s scheduling page.

Despite the uncertainty, I still wanted to design for the ideal integrated experience. I created early concepts based on Labcorp’s existing scheduling flow so we’d be ready when their API became available.

In mid-May, I presented designs for an ideal scheduling experience that would eventually use LabCorp’s API. I advocated for this approach as the best way to help patients complete their labs.

Because this was a net-new feature, implementation required Praia’s involvement. I worked closely with the Providence app product owner to define design specs and use cases.

We launched the lab booking experience and Labcorp integration on November 21, 2024 - a major milestone for the Providence app as its first ecosystem partner integration.

Post-launch, we saw a notable improvement in lab completion rates. Patients using the Providence app had a 58% 30-day completion rate, compared to 37% for those using MyChart.

We also saw the highest engagement of any NBA card at a 39.2% click-through rate.

Document your sad paths and edge cases: Leading with the happy path helps drive clarity and momentum, but supporting end-to-end flows means planning for what happens when things don’t go as expected. What if a patient has location services turned off? What if they miss their appointment? Defining these scenarios early helps create a more refined experience.

Balancing deadlines with impact: Meeting deadlines is paramount. However, delivering an experience that best helps patients can override a target date. In this project, we chose to delay launch to include the LabCorp integration, which made the feature significantly more useful. It was a reminder that pushing back a release can be the right call when it leads to better outcomes for patients and care teams.