Designing a 'Get Care' feature for 1.46M patients, enabling them to find the right care option and routing them toward locations with actual capacity.
Over two years at Deloitte, I worked with M Health Fairview, a Minnesota health system with 200+ hospitals and clinics, on making their digital front door actually lead somewhere. A Deloitte Studios team working offshore, against a live enterprise site.
From heuristic audit through competitive research to shipped features, across the Get Care flow, scheduling, and the platform's navigation itself.
where do 1.46M patients go first?
A health system's digital front door
M Health Fairview serves Minnesota with 200+ hospitals and medical services. Their website is where patients decide what care they need and how to get it.
Over a year-plus engagement, our team shipped features easing that journey. This case study focuses on how patients get the right care.
why couldn't patients book care?
A broken booking flow, and a front door that didn't lead anywhere
- 01Business needs
Direct patients where the system has capacity. Push virtual care to relieve high-volume locations. Educate patients about services, conditions, providers. Promote labs and preventative care.
- 02User needs
Patients were overwhelmed by care types: online, in-person, urgent, virtual urgent, primary. Booking was hard to follow. No centralized place held all the options.
- 03What the heuristic audit found
A broken booking flow with lengthy descriptions. Inconsistent visual treatments, redundant options, unclear hierarchy and UX copy. Key actions below the fold. An "Emergency Care" CTA that set false expectations, leading only to an explainer page.
annotated audit of the old Get Care pagehow does everyone else do it?
Nine health systems, one pattern
With no access to primary research, we studied how nine major systems surface care options: Cleveland Clinic, NewYork-Presbyterian, Cedars-Sinai, NYU Langone, UCLA Health, Mass General, Northwestern, Mayo Clinic, and UCSF Health. The patterns ran from conversational questionnaires to mega-menus to dedicated Get Care pages. UCLA's real-world language and Cedars-Sinai's care-type explanations stood out.
We studied how nine major health systems surface care options and let patients schedule. Three patterns emerged.
- 01Cleveland ClinicHomepage
How they surface care
A dedicated Get Care section on the homepage, linking out to a contact number, appointment form, Virtual Visits, urgent care clinics, and virtual second opinions.
What stood out
Differentiated by care type and provided links right from the start.
- 02NewYork-PresbyterianNo Get Care page
How they surface care
No separate Get Care page. Focuses on two functions: "Find a Doctor" and "Digital Health Services."
What stood out
The Digital Health Services / telehealth page works really well.
- 03Cedars-SinaiBy care type
How they surface care
Get Care divided by care type (primary, urgent, virtual), all clickable components leading to their respective pages.
What stood out
Explains the difference between urgent care, emergency, and primary care really well.
- 04NYU LangoneHomepage + Locations
How they surface care
Surfaces only doctors and virtual urgent visits through the homepage. Services are segregated on the Locations page.
What stood out
The Emergency Care page stands out.
- 05UCLA HealthAppointment page
How they surface care
A "Make an Appointment" page covering appointment types (schedule through the patient portal, request an appointment, book by phone) plus resources on what to keep in mind before scheduling.
What stood out
Real-world conversational language and copy.
- 06Massachusetts General HospitalMega menu
How they surface care
Care types surfaced through the mega menu. The Appointments and Referrals tab holds Request an Appointment, Covid Care, and Refer a Patient.
What stood out
The Appointment Resources section effectively serves as Get Care.
- 07NorthwesternAppointments page
How they surface care
The Appointments page divides care into Symptom Checker, Primary Care, Covid Vaccine, Immediate Care, and Diagnostic Scheduling.
What stood out
Confusing UI.
- 08Mayo ClinicQuestionnaire
How they surface care
Patients request an appointment through a conversational questionnaire and are redirected to the care type or content they need.
What stood out
Increases the sense of personalization.
- 09UCSF HealthFooter
How they surface care
"Getting Care" sits in the footer, linking to Find a Doctor, Emergency Care, Primary Care, All Medical Services, and International Services.
- 01Care gets sorted, but by different logic
Cedars-Sinai splits by care type (primary, urgent, virtual) and explains the difference between them clearly. Northwestern splits by symptom checker, primary, immediate, and diagnostic, and the result is confusing. The categories matter less than whether patients recognize themselves in them.
- 02The best flows sound like a person
UCLA Health uses real-world conversational copy on its appointment page. Mayo Clinic routes patients through a conversational questionnaire that redirects them to the right care type, which increases the sense of personalization. Language was doing as much work as information architecture.
- 03There's no consensus on where care lives
Cleveland Clinic surfaces it on the homepage. Massachusetts General buries it in the mega menu. UCSF Health puts it in the footer. NewYork-Presbyterian skips a Get Care page entirely. No dominant pattern meant no safe default to copy, so we chose our own organizing principle: urgency.
Secondary research sharpened the goal. Patients default to emergency care for non-urgent needs because primary care appointments are inaccessible, disproportionately burdening ED resources. That framed the design goal: route urgency correctly.
Secondary research
Why patients use the ED for non-urgent care
Published research on emergency department use pointed to a consistent set of drivers, and only one of them was about symptoms.
Barriers to the alternative · 5 of 6
- Inaccessible primary care Patients couldn't get a timely appointment with their own provider.
- Convenience The ED is open, walk-in, and requires no scheduling.
- Trust in the ED A belief that emergency care is more thorough or more reliable.
- Guidance from a provider or family Patients were directed there by someone they trusted.
- Insurance Coverage shaped which door felt available to them.
Genuine clinical need · 1 of 6
- Perceived urgency Patients genuinely believed the situation warranted emergency care.
Most of these have nothing to do with misreading symptoms. Patients weren't failing to understand urgency, they were choosing the only door that was reliably open. That reframed the problem: the site's job wasn't to educate people about care types, it was to make a faster alternative visible and obviously available.
what couldn't we change?
Designing inside the fences
MyChart. Scheduling lived in a third-party API. We owned the journey up to the handoff, not the booking transaction itself.
Time. A little over two sprints, at the tail end of a planned roadmap.
No primary research. Users in Minnesota, team offshore. We leaned on analytics, heuristics, and secondary research instead, and stayed honest about what we couldn't know.
what shapes could this take?
Sorting care by urgency, not by org chart
Crazy 8s and IA sketches converged on four decisions: sort care types into immediate versus appointment. Explain specific care types, primary versus specialty. Surface differences between care types: cost, availability, online versus in-person. And expose other channels like the tele-digi phone line.
Crazy 8s
crazy 8s sketch boardIA concept
IA concept mapchoose your care option
Everything above the fold, split by urgency
old: what kind of care do you need?
new: choose your care optionGet Care Today. Same-day care: eVisits promoted with a 'Faster response time' tag to pull non-urgent load off emergency care, virtual urgent care, and nearest walk-in locations with live wait times.
Get Care Today, finalEntry points to Labs and Checkups. Lab appointments and annual checkups joined the same page.
Promo banners. Carousel space for the business to promote services.
booking for later
Schedule Your Care
Schedule Your Care. Appointments for a later date, filtered by the type of provider or service: routine preventive, primary care, and specialty care with 12+ categories and sub-specialties.
Schedule Your Care, final
specialty categories viewthe second most-used element on the platform
A mega menu 400K interactions strong
Contextual role-play testing, analytics review, and stakeholder co-design sessions surfaced patients' most frequent navigation needs. We translated those into a redesigned mega menu and header experience, which became the platform's second most-interacted element with 400K+ navigation events.
mega menu, before
mega menu, afterwhat came out of it?
The front door, finally leading somewhere
- 01Designing without access to users.
No primary research forced rigor with analytics, heuristics, and competitor evidence, and honesty about what we couldn't know.
- 02The constraint was the brief.
MyChart owned booking, so the job became getting patients to the right handoff confidently, not redesigning the transaction.
- 03Urgency, not service lines.
The organization thinks in departments; patients think in "how soon do I need this." Reorganizing around urgency was the unlock.