Improving appointment status updates
DispatchHealth gives patients access to medical care from the comfort of their own home, by allowing patients the ability to request and schedule appoints by phone, online or in app.
THE PROBLEM
Patients who request an appointment through the app result in a ‘no show’ visit at a rate of over 30%.
*No-show accounts for any drop off after request is submitted.
TEAM
• Senior product manager
• Engineering manager
• Business stakeholders
To understand why patients weren’t showing up for scheduled appointments, I mapped the existing post-request flow. Analytics revealed key drop-off points, and patient interviews helped uncover the underlying pain points and barriers to follow-through:
Discovery
Patients didn’t understand there were additional steps to schedule
After submitting a request through the app, patients were unaware they would receive a follow-up phone call from a care representative to finalize their appointment. As a result, many screened or ignored these calls, leading to missed connections and higher “no-show” rates.
Missing a critical status: clinical team arrival
While patients received a status update when the medical team was en route, there was no alert indicating the team’s arrival. This gap led to confusion and missed appointments — a clear opportunity to improve communication and reliability within the experience.
How might we communicate important appointment updates to our patients?
The design approach
There were two distinctly different problem areas identified, so we took an incremental approach with two experiments launched successively.
Using friendly language and operational transparency, I updated the post-request design to reflect the internal scheduling and dispatch process in a way that patients can understand, giving them the opportunity to confidently schedule- and be ready for- their in home appointment.
Appointment request confirmation
The original confirmation page failed to indicate that a phone call was required to schedule the appointment, leading to missed actions and frustration. Inconsistent use of content, iconography, and interaction patterns created confusion and eroded user trust — ultimately impacting both the patient experience and overall conversion.
BEFORE
Confirmation page is a misnomer, in that the request is not confirmed. We updated this page to focus messaging on setting appropriate expectations about the required phone call. We also included a CTA to collect insurance, which takes a lot of time on scene, as well as self serve request cancellation to reduce inbound calls.
WHAT CHANGED
Appointment statuses
Previously, the request confirmation and appointment statuses were combined on a single page that was hard to access within the app. As a result, patients often missed time-sensitive information needed to prepare for their appointments. The static destination map added further confusion, as many patients assumed it reflected the care team’s live location, leading to a false sense of their appointment status.
BEFORE
To improve visibility of time-sensitive appointment updates, we introduced a new dynamic status modality that would update throughout an active request, leveraging data we already had. We removed the static destination map to eliminate confusion around real-time tracking and added a new status trigger to indicate when the medical team arrives on-site — a key moment for both patients and staff.
Since customer satisfaction (CSAT) was a top business priority, we also implemented a post-appointment CSAT widget, allowing us to collect feedback at the most relevant and meaningful point in the user journey.
WHAT CHANGED
Impact
87%
Drop in ‘no show’ requests
38%
Drop in canceled requests
Drop in inbound calls from app-initiated requests
26%
Post-appointment CSAT completed, with 16% improvement in CSAT score
92%
What’s Next?
This work sparked a new initiative focused on global app improvements and design standards.
