Pivoting during a pandemic
Content design | UX writing | User research | SMS | Web design | Community outreach
Summary
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a swift and strategic pivot transformed a five-year plan for virtual care into a five-week reality. I helped OhioHealth, central Ohio’s largest health system, launch telehealth services and a vaccination program. This enabled the system to continue providing essential services and promote community safety. Over the following 15 months, I partnered with product, research, design and clinical stakeholders to develop microsites, training content, scheduling flows and SMS campaigns, a virtual waiting room and numerous communications.
The challenge
When COVID-19 came knocking, OhioHealth had to accelerate a multiyear telehealth launch plan to keep our doors open for those who needed us most. The ways we delivered care required quick, drastic changes.
Then Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines achieved emergency use authorization. OhioHealth needed a widespread vaccination program. The public had questions about when, where and how they would be vaccinated. Communicating with existing patients was straightforward. We could email, text (with their consent) or message them updates through OhioHealth MyChart, our electronic health record. We needed a single source of truth, where any Ohio resident and our associates could find reliable, timely updates.
The solution
Our teams rallied around the desperate cause, and by summer 2020, our patients were treated by their primary care and specialist providers from the safety and comfort of their own home. As the months went on, our telehealth strategy evolved, and our virtual health offerings expanded to include same-day urgent care video visits. We built a microsite for COVID-19, where we updated patients on visitor and mask policies, testing, monocolonal antibody therapy and how to support the organization.
When vaccines became available to the public the following winter, OhioHealth was allotted a certain number of doses each week. Eligibility was determined by age ranges and health conditions set by the state. Our operational capabilities for administering vaccines evolved by the day, along with the volume of information we needed to share. I proposed that we create a new subsection of the site. The bulk of our traffic to the pages would come directly from search, marketing or promotional banners across our website. And limiting the section to vaccine information kept visitors from getting lost. We also added a link back to the general COVID-19 page in our navigation menu.
TELEHEALTH LAUNCH CONTRIBUTIONS
Many of these tactics went through several iterations as our technical capabilities, scheduling, and understanding of the patient and provider experience matured. The telehealth webpage held the top SERP spot for keywords like, "video visits near me," for many months, and later held steady in the first or second spot.
I developed educational content, infographics and 40+ blog posts for our COVID-19 toolkit. This involved multidisciplinary partnership and regularly interviewing our clinicians.
I created the information architecture and content for new telehealth webpages. These included step-by-step instructions for video visits, with variants for desktop computers and mobile devices.
I produced content for our urgent care video visits web and in-app scheduling flows, including microcopy for modals and errors. I also created email tactics, banners and content modules for high-traffic pages to promoted same-day urgent care video visits.
I wrote the copy for our Virtual Health program page, which served as a destination for our telehealth advertising.
I created in-app education pages mirroring the new webpages, so that members could schedule and prepare for telehealth visits without leaving the product.
BEFORE
AFTER
I collaborated with product owners, UX designers and developers on our new scheduling page, which created a new entry point to urgent care video visits and other self-scheduling options.
Along with all the above, I also:
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Scripted, narrated and produced multiple training videos in Camtasia, with graphic support from our digital designer
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Wrote email and text appointment reminders
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Edited copy for our virtual waiting room
VACCINATION PROGRAM
I worked closely with marketing and communications partners, operations and clinicians to determine what could be shared about vaccines. Then I mapped our user journeys. We knew we would have three primary audiences:
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Those who wanted to schedule a vaccine appointment
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Those who already had scheduled and wanted to know what to expect
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Those who were undecided and seeking trustworthy information
I developed the information architecture and built many of the page elements on my own in the CMS, with oversight or support from a digital designer when needed.
Our vaccination landing page was simple, with three pathways users could take, eligibility information and a banner at the top that changed almost daily (sometimes more often) announcing vaccine availability. Subpages for the three pathways matched our audiences' intentions. I added an FAQ and included a page for our vaccine clinic locations.
For months, I lived in our CMS, constantly making content updates and evolving the design as needed, sometimes multiple times a day. As vaccine availability expanded, the landing page and clinic locations pages blended to simplify the experience. And as the general COVID-19 section shrunk, we were able to bring the vaccine section up in the site hierarchy to keep all COVID-19 information in one place.
I frequently updated our FAQ to align with evolving guidance from our health system, state and federal sources. I also built out a fast-facts section to feature topical blog posts from our COVID-19 blog series.
I produced fresh copy regularly our homepage and promotional banners across high-traffic pages.
Ask me for other samples of my homepage work! They showcase my clever, creative writing style in small bites.
KEEPING SHOTS ON SCHEDULE
Our marketing team decided to use text messages to remind people about their vaccine appointments and share important things to know before they arrived. The cadence we first tested was 7, 3, 1: One week, three days and one day before their appointment. Patients were asked to confirm their appointment three days out, but could reply to confirm, reschedule or cancel at any point. The day before their appointment, we provided information about our mask and visitor policies, when to arrive, what to wear and what to bring. I rewrote messaging drafted by stakeholders, provided all new copy as needed and proposed updates to our unsubscribe flow. I collaborated on flows with our UX strategist in Whimsical, and in strategy discussions with our outreach and engagement team. We later started testing an alternate cadence, with fewer messages and less copy.
The text messages were dynamic, based on whether a recipient had signed up for MyChart, and if so, whether they had completed eCheck-In. Each text message had a matching autodialer message that I wrote. Stakeholders requested links to provide patients with additional information. I tested the impact of linking within text messages, including how different devices responded to link placement. I also proposed a nomenclature convention for redirect links.
The outcome
Our success in launching telehealth so quickly helped stabilize OhioHealth's revenue through the pandemic. Patients were quick adopters of telehealth, due in large part to our quick resource production. In follow-up surveys and research discussions, patients shared that they plan to continue using telehealth.
The COVID-19 and vaccine webpages became a single source of truth that not only the public, but our own associates, accessed for up-to-date information. The banner on our landing page was a particularly important element that our hotline representatives depended on for support. It announced when we had open vaccine appointment slots and when we did not. It also contained our calls to action for scheduling, which differed by whether you were a patient with MyChart access or a member of the general public. At times, it included eligibility details. Conveying all of this information clearly and succinctly in one or two sentences was a challenge. I created several iterations over the months, and always had two versions ready to swap in and out as we acquired or ran out of vaccine doses.
Our vaccine text messaging campaigns helped minimize no-shows, and expedited the appointment process for those who used eCheck-In through OhioHealth MyChart. After launching them, the organization saw value in using using test reminders for other visits. Sending reminders for same-day urgent care video visits was a particular operational challenge we had to overcome because of the short time frame between scheduling and the appointment. Initially, we decided to test sending standard reminders two days before the patient's appointment. Later, we began testing a cadence of three weeks, three days and three hours. For urgent care video visits, we sent a text confirmation at the time of scheduling, and attempted to send another one hour before the appointment. When I left OhioHealth, we were exploring how to enable additional communication preferences, so patients would have greater control over how many reminders they received, as well as when and how.
My involvement on this project also benefited others I worked on during this time frame, including email, digital advertising and print tactics. While this project was incredibly time consuming and exhausting, it was also unbelievably rewarding. I got to be part of a team pioneering an experience that none of us could have imagined. The decisions I made had to happen fast, because people's lives truly depended on them.