Healthcare 311 NewsNews & notes on convenient care, from Healthcare 311

We’ve linked you to a screencap of a health care facilities search tool in action, not to point fingers at the creator of that application – which by some accounts is very popular – but to use it as a point of departure for talking about why doing easy things can be hard sometimes. We LIKE that we are at the stage where we can consider what kinds of clinics location strategies and executions make the most sense – that we are BEYOND the stage where people are undecided WHETHER such capabilities make sense in the first place. We’re making progress, and our progress is toward making “easy” and convenient things TRULY easy and convenient. Finally, note that a) elements of our praise and/or criticism may apply to other clinics locators, including our own; and b) our observations are basically preliminary jottings – deadline pressures and all that, y’know…. Your own comments, suggestions, observations & corrections are welcome.

One of the chief difficulties of doing easy things is that they can seem so easy that aspects of accomplishing them are taken for granted. In the case of clinics search, the activity seems mind-numbingly obvious in almost every respect: “hey, you just search for, y’know, clinics, and you get results, and you get up and go to one. Doesn’t Google do this already?”

No, Google doesn’t do this already. In fact, it may be getting worse at it (we hope to write more on why that is true someday. For now, take our word for it).

There’s no “required” start point for clinics search, but it can be helpful to consider the user, and make some educated design guesses to begin with.

So:

• People looking for clinics have an immediate but not an emergency need to know where they are. They aren’t gushing blood, but they do have a troubling throbbing, ringing, burning, itching, etc., that they want to have addressed quite soon, and with minimal complication.

  This means they want to know where clinics are nearby, and quickly.

• They’re likely to have a general feel for their local area – if you tell them the name of a nearby town they probably know it. And according to the latest research from Rand and Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, people looking for clinic care tend to be from where they’re looking.
• Merely showing someone that a clinic exists, within a particular number of “as the crow flies” miles gives them no “feel” for the clinic’s proximity in their local context.
• They don’t want to have to scroll through long lists of clinics, they don’t need a huge variety of search/sort options, and they may not be able to move back & forth across multiple screens of information on the gadget they’re searching from. Dealing with lots of pick lists, dropdown menus, and graphics-heavy controls on cellphones is no fun. A person searching for clinics needs to be looking at details about a nearby clinic in seconds.
• They’ll want to be able to access clinics information from a smartphone. More & more people have them, and quite often the need for routine non-urgent care happens when a notebook or other “less mobile” computer is unavailable. Again, keeping a user’s control options very simple is critical. Multiple boxes to check, picklists to peruse, options to manipulate, are obstacles, rather than benefits, to the typical user.

So what does the application depicted do well, and not so well?

Good

• it sorts results by distance from the search location by default. This is better than sorting them alphabetically, which some of the clinic operators’ own search tools do. Ideally, the application would pick up search location information from the user’s location – particularly when the person is searching from a “real” mobile device, like a cellphone – and automatically arrange the sort in that fashion – but no one is doing this at present that we’re aware of.
• Ability to sort by distance, or by featured clinics – we like this feature, but feel it should only be displayed once a list – by distance – is generated. Focus on what the user’s need is first.

Not So Good

• No names of the places where listed clinics are: The town where a clinic is is displayed once you click through a listing, but until then you only have a clinic’s name and it’s distance from the place entered for the search (presumably a “zip code center” or other lat/long centering convention). Why be so opaque about where listed clinics are? It’s confusing, and requires extra steps – unless the 1st choice happens to suit the user’s purposes, s/he has to go back and forth from the list to detail.
• Too many distracting search options: why distinguish searches by retail and urgent care clinics? Why not simply indicate in the list results what sort of clinic the location is?

Clicking through to a specific clinic’s information, we find – important things missing, and/or confusing.

• There is no information on the clinic’s operating hours. None. That’s…bad. Really inconvenient. Really unhelpful. Really lazy (it’s publicly available for most clinics, for goodness sake).
• The application helpfully lists “additional” clinics “in” the town where the specific clinic we’ve drilled down to is based – but of course many if not most of these additional clinics are not IN the town, and the individual listings do not display any town or city information, so…. another confusing & frustrating oversight. You HAVE that data – why not deploy it more helpfully?