Patient Access Marketplace

The Patient Access Marketplace is an e-commerce platform for free and paid-for health and wellbeing services from pharmacies, physiotherapists, chiropractors, and other health providers. I worked in a small but nimble product team along with an engineering group to deliver a pilot launch in 9 months to over 10 million Patient Access users.

I also built its companion product, Patient Access Pro.

The opportunity

Patient as a company was entirely reliant on parent company investment and NHS grants for funding. This project marked a fundamental shift for the organisation. Our ambition was to support a mixed ecosystem of NHS and private providers and start generating direct revenue for the business. We aimed to do this while maintaining our position as the most widely-used GP services app in the country.

The marketplace would also a critical step in the vision to make Patient Access a one-stop place for people to manage all aspects of their health. It was also well aligned with the NHS long-term plan to move patients towards private services provided by a network of health providers, freeing up capacity in GP practices.

Validating assumptions

We first set out to test the concept to understand if people would be willing to view Patient Access as a place to access both free and paid-for services.

Our initial research indicated that our users were not particularly aware of the wide range of services available to them through the broader healthcare market. It also highlighted that some groups would be willing to pay for services if it meant they could get better access to them.

Many people told us that they would typically go through their GP practice first. They also assumed that they would be able to get any service for free on the NHS, which is not the case.

Approach

From the outset, we knew we needed to be careful with how the marketplace would be positioned. It was essential that users did not see us as trying to privatise the NHS or take attention away from GP practice services. With our initial research findings, we put together 3 principles to align around:

NHS services must take precedence over paid services where available.
Booking a service should be familiar to people who may have already booked a hotel room, food delivery, etc.
The booking process should be simple and scalable enough to support other health provider types and use cases as needed.

We had access to many industry partners through our parent organisation and a strong advertising network through Patient.info; we wanted to connect all of these resources. We also analysed many popular booking platforms and established an internal baseline of what we thought a good customer journey looked like. This was where I started to flesh out our initial design concepts.

The first high level user flow including entry points for cross-promotion.
The service details and eligibility check steps were later removed while optimising the purchasing journey.

User research

I planned and executed a user testing programme over the course of 3 months. This involved building and iterating on an end-to-end prototype of the marketplace experience for different device types, recruiting participants, and facilitating over 50 usability testing sessions.

I was also presenting back to the organisation about our findings and quickly iterating on our concepts using the feedback that was given. Some of the key takeaways about customer behaviour and expectations were:

People showed a strong preference to NHS equivalent services, but were often disappointed to learn that wait times are typically very long to access them.
People wanted to find services by category or condition (e.g sexual health or skin rash), not by provider type (e.g pharmacy).
Service price was roughly even with availability as the deciding factor booking with for a particular service provider. People were generally willing to spend a little bit more if it meant they could get an appointment sooner.
People wanted to find out more about the provider while they were booking the service (e.g reviews and information about the person who would provide the service).

Some of the initial wireframes that I used during the first round of user testing.

Challenges

As we continued to iterate and scope out what the marketplace should be, we had to overcome several large obstacles:

Patient Access was seen by millions of people as the app for accessing their GP services. It was jarring at first for some users to find themselves in an ecosystem of other health providers as well.
A fully joined-up ecosystem of provider and customer would require substantial technical uplift of some other products within the EMIS portfolio. This would not be feasible for the launch and for years to come.
The health services we could offer were entirely dependent on commercial arrangements. The service offering at launch would be very limited and also regionalised depending on where our partners offered them.
To begin with, a user would need to be a registered Patient Access user to book an appointment. This greatly increased the barrier to entry as they would need to be registered via their GP practice.

These are things we looked to mitigate the impact of to begin with, and iron out when we had more opportunity to in the future.

Signposting of NHS services in the first high-fidelity iteration of the booking flow.

What I designed

My work was focused on the core booking experience and translating it to different service and device types. This covered:

Finding the right service
Understanding if the service is right for you
Selecting the service provider with the best price and availability
Entering payment details and paying
Reviewing and confirming your appointment

From the outset we were focused on delivering a cohesive cross-platform experience.

Impact

The Patient Access Marketplace launched in full during the summer of 2019 after a 3 month pilot phase. Over 100 pharmacies were part of the launch with a nationwide physiotherapy provider joining shortly after.

As a U.K.-first offering, we had a lot to learn from how our users engaged with the marketplace. We continued to work on enhancements and optimisations to improve the offering. In particular we were focused on adding new provider types and optimising the booking journey further.

Some notable achievements:

Over 1/4 of active Patient Access users explored the service offerings in the marketplace.
Over 50,000 appointments were completed in the first 6 months, many of these were for free NHS services.
Over £750,000 of revenue was generated across service providers in the first 6 months.

We had to hard pivot in the beginning of 2020 due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We looked to help health providers diversify by providing more capabilities to offer virtual appointments, delivery services, and more.

Today, the marketplace has expanded to offer a wide variety of health services, consultations, blood tests, and many more.