AMN Healthcare
2017 - 2018


AMN Healthcare, a two-billion-dollar publicly traded U.S. healthcare staffing company, approached Thinktiv to identify net-new opportunities for innovation. Within this engagement, AMN sought to improve their internal experience for credentialing medical professionals to work at designated facilities.

The existing credentialing process was highly manual and took approximately 30 minutes for the best analysts. For the majority of analysts, the present method also amplified an already high-stress and high-turnover environment.

Our new experience delivered a 6x increase in speed via a thoroughly modern and contemporary workflow. What previously took the better part of an hour could now be accomplished in minutes. In doing so, we also succeeded in dramatically reducing the overall stress and complexity of the process.




We ran a twelve-week research and design program, gaining feedback from AMN team leads and analysts at each step to confirm assertions and ensure that each our end designs would prove valuable to both customer (Credentialing Analyst) and business.

The project commenced with a two-day on-site including the full project team. Most of our time was spent listening to AMN experts: team leads and Credentialing Analysts who would later be asked to use the packet generator tool.





Our team interviewed five AMN Credentialing Analysts across three departments — in conference rooms, at their desks, and via web conference — and had them walk us through the current packet generation experience.

Observation of these workflows helped us understand current pain points as well as additional opportunities for new ways to add value.



After our initial on-site, we developed a prioritization grid to inform feature allocation and value. As we reflected back on the core requirements as well as our experience requirements, we presented a new set of groupings that could easily be shared and processed.

We utilized a car brand metaphor, considering three tiers: Smart Car (Base), Prius (Advanced), and Tesla (Luxury) to help communicate our beliefs around both the importance and level of difficulty required to build such features. Metaphors such as these cars are helpful to present for those without a mental model for the balance between difficulty and value in product development.




With confirmation of our requirements’ scope, an empathetic understanding of Credentialing Analysts’ context and needs, and some high-level inspiration, we began to craft concept narratives.

We wrote and presented the story of a fictional Credentialing Analyst, Amy, as she interacted with a client over time to ensure that a fully complete packet was delivered.




Medium-fidelity wireframe flows were loaded into a prototyping application for testing with Credentialing Analysts to determine if the interactions and activities proposed to be accomplished within the packet generation tool would meet the needs of those analysts.

At the conclusion of user testing, we documented an average of users considering their experience a 9 out of 10.



From testing, we confirmed a variety of improvements that we should make as we moved into detailed visual design. A comprehensive set of flows were created and catalogued to best facilitate the later development of the new platform.



A range of high-fidelity screens were produced to demonstrate the product in its near-final form. Our initial goal was to create three hero screens that could be used to inspire the direction of implementation. However, as it became clear that we had the potential to work on the implementation itself, it seemed essential to go beyond this work and begin the full product guide required to realize all aspects of the system.



At the conclusion of this project, a summary of the discovery work was packaged as a deliverable brief. The document included a full spectrum of project artifacts, with the goal of connecting the dots between process and outcome. The brief served to answer the project’s core question: “How can AMN’s internal teams generate packets in 5 minutes or less?”.




PROJECT DETAILS


Client

AMN Healthcare
Strategy Partner
Thinktiv
Technology Partner
Kickdrum
Team
Jonathan Lewis, Exp. Director
Andrew Persoff, Project Lead
Eric Boggs, UX Researcher
Joe Ramirez, UI/UX Designer