Rethinking care management for CPPS treatment
Making it easier for physical therapists to track progress, make decisions, and adapt care with confidence.
Typology
Industry
Digital Health
Year
2024
Rethinking care management for CPPS treatment
Making it easier for physical therapists to track progress, make decisions, and adapt care with confidence.
Typology
Industry
Digital Health
Year
2024
Project Summary
CPPS patients face fragmented care, years of uncertainty, and little structured guidance.
A health platform for symptom tracking, education, and clinician-patient communication.
Clearer care continuity, better treatment tracking, and a more supported patient experience.
Interface design, design system, and prototyping in collaboration with clinicians and Stanford Biodesign participants.
Overview
This project originated from the Loka Innovators Award, an initiative designed to explore new opportunities in healthcare innovation.
Working alongside Stanford Biodesign student winners, we conducted a design sprint to investigate how digital tools could improve the care journey for patients with Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome (CPPS).
The sprint brought together designers, healthcare innovators, and a physical therapist to explore the problem space and prototype potential solutions. The result was Onyx, a platform concept designed to help clinicians track treatment progress and communicate with patients more effectively.
My Role
Discovery & Synthesis
Participated in end-to-end discovery and synthesis
Design Sprint
Led an on-site, cross-functional design sprint at Stanford University to define the problem space, and explore early solution directions
Experience Definition
Contributed to overall experience definition and product framing
UI/UX Design
Owned the UI/UX design for the Physical Therapist viewport
The Design Sprint
We conducted a design sprint with Loka designers, Stanford Biodesign student winners, and a physical therapist to better understand the CPPS care journey and explore potential solutions.
Through exercises such as user persona creation, problem framing, journey mapping, and rapid ideation, the team identified key opportunities to improve clinician visibility into patient progress and communication.
The sprint ultimately shaped the core direction for the Onyx platform.
Understanding the Problem
CPPS as a Care Challenge
CPPS affects a significant portion of the population, yet patients often spend years navigating unclear diagnoses, fragmented care, and inconsistent treatment plans. Symptoms fluctuate, progress is rarely linear, and setbacks are common.
Patients often interact with multiple specialists throughout their treatment journey, which makes care coordination challenging.
Clinicians frequently lack tools to track patient progress between visits and maintain consistent communication with patients.
This creates fragmented care and limited visibility into treatment adherence.
The Clinician Perspective
Through discovery and direct collaboration with pelvic floor physical therapists, several recurring constraints emerged:
Limited Session Time
Requiring fast context-building and decision-making within each appointment
High Education Burden
Therapists must tailor explanations to different learning styles, every session
Low Continuity
Cancellations, flare-ups, and remote disengagement break the care thread between visits
Fragmented Charting
Existing systems make it hard to track symptom progression over time
CPPS Complexity
Spanning physical, emotional, dietary, sexual, and stress-related factors simultaneously
Design Focus
Based on research insights, we identified key design priorities to guide the platform experience.
Focus areas
Improve visibility into patient progress
Design a clear dashboard that helps clinicians quickly understand patient status and treatment activity.
Enable clinician-patient communication
Provide an integrated messaging system to support ongoing communication and follow-ups.
Support treatment tracking
Allow clinicians to monitor exercises and patient activity over time.
Reduce workflow friction
Design an interface that fits naturally into clinicians' existing workflows.
The Solution
Patient Management Dashboard
Clinicians needed a clear overview of patient status and treatment progress.
A dashboard that centralizes patient information, treatment progress, and activity updates.
Clinicians can quickly understand patient status and prioritize follow-ups.
In-App Messaging & Care Coordination
Clinicians often rely on external tools like email or phone calls to communicate with patients, which fragments conversations and raises patient data privacy concerns.
A secure in-app messaging system enables clinicians and patients to communicate directly within the platform.
Centralized conversations, faster communication, and improved protection of sensitive patient information.
Exercise Creation & Library
Creating exercise plans from scratch for every patient slowed down clinicians and created inconsistent treatment workflows.
An exercise creation tool combined with a reusable library allows therapists to quickly assign previously created exercises to patients.
Faster treatment plan creation and more consistent exercise programs across patients.
Reflection
Designing Onyx highlighted how important visibility and communication are in complex healthcare journeys. Working closely with clinicians helped ensure the platform addressed real workflow challenges rather than theoretical ones.
The design sprint proved particularly valuable in aligning stakeholders and quickly identifying the most impactful product opportunities.
