AcuityMD is passionate about improving patient outcomes by accelerating adoption of medical technology. We believe the best ideas come from resilient employees empowered to take risks and solve problems. Our culture values incremental improvement, reflection, accountability, and measurement in pursuit of this mission.
Taking risks to solve a big problem is exactly how we created a powerful new solution, AcuityMD Care Journeys.
Developing a new MedTech intelligence solution takes teamwork. Sometimes it’s a straightforward project with a tried and true playbook. But sometimes you realize that you have to make something that doesn’t currently exist. Then the challenge for product managers, designers, and developers is not just figuring out how to fill a blank canvas, but how to create the canvas itself.
Care Journeys started with a simple premise: our customers would benefit from showing patient leakage data - when a patient receives a diagnosis in one health system but seeks treatment elsewhere - to healthcare executives, and then demonstrating how their innovative medical technology will keep patients within that system, delivering a clear return on investment.
Megan Wilson, Director, Product Management, knew this would be a complex problem since MedTech companies need procedure-specific leakage data to build this ROI case. “Existing market solutions tend to overestimate leakage because they look at all patients who move through a hospital system,” she pointed out.
She had an idea for how AcuityMD could query patient-level data using a model that would allow customers to calculate precise leakage by defining their patient population and target procedure through any combination of billing codes. The model could analyze those codes to determine patients in a diagnosed population, how many received a certain procedure and where, quality of care outcomes, and referral pathways – even with multiple diagnoses, procedures, providers, or sites of care involved.
“But that created a new challenge: how to display this data. The early prototypes were underwhelming to customers, to say the least,” Megan noted. She knew that simple and impactful visualizations were needed for this solution to provide value to customers and a pie chart wasn’t going to cut it.
Megan reached out to the senior designer on this project with a simple directive: “We don’t have a design library for this, so try what you think will work best.”
The designer considered a Sankey diagram to visualize patient flow. But it wasn’t quite a perfect fit for representing complex healthcare journeys. As Megan explained, “Sankey diagrams are great for representing something like financial data. If you start with $1,000, you can easily show where that money goes - you can’t spend a single dollar on two things. But patients can get two treatments for one diagnosis. They can get 10 treatments for one diagnosis by eight providers at four different sites of care. It’s significantly more complicated.”
With Megan’s refinements in mind, the designer adjusted her initial approach and created a custom visual that incorporated the multiple variables that can be involved in a patient’s journey.
The feedback from both customers and colleagues was overwhelmingly positive. Everybody loved how beautiful, simple and intuitive it was, and how the model worked across multiple use cases. Customers also immediately understood how this could enable them to build an ROI story about patient leakage, referral patterns, and quality of care outcomes.
The catch was, now the AcuityMD team had to figure out how to build a functional version of a concept that was designed with no constraints. Unfortunately, there were no ready-made software libraries for the visualization.
Knowing how important fast iteration cycles and feedback are in product development, V1.0 of Care Journeys used a library that built the graph as a regular Sankey diagram. This led to a subtle, but significant problem. A Sankey diagram needs to be proportional.
But as noted above, this is not how healthcare data works. The team added in extra logic to weight certain diagnoses and procedures and give the most visual real estate to the most relevant information.
However, not only did this weighting logic cause a number of bugs, the graph was not as visually compelling as the original design. Customers needed granular data on patient journeys, but equally important was getting that data in a way that could be understood. MedTech companies wanted healthcare executives to be able to understand their patient leakage problems with a glance, not with a long-winded explanation.
While the development team was trying to make ready-made software libraries work, Cora Sutton, Senior Engineer, Applications, felt something was off. She believed that they should make the engineering work to the original design, rather than adjusting the design to make it work with available software libraries.
“Our engineering team has a mantra of ‘Run towards the danger,’” Cora explained. “We can solve hard problems if we’re motivated to take them on, and I was especially motivated by the potential of this solution. It felt like it was our future to make.”
The risk paid off. Cora was able to directly replicate the design that customers had responded to – one that displayed complex patient care data simply and intuitively. And since she had built this software library from scratch, she was easily able to add eye-catching interactions that would be compelling in a sales pitch.
After months of planning, development, iterating, and user testing, the concept to visually represent patient leakage had evolved into a fully formed solution. AcuityMD Care Journeys was made generally available at Flywheel 2024 to a tremendous initial reception.
Since its launch, Care Journeys has helped MedTech companies demonstrate the improved clinical and financial outcomes their technology delivers for patients with complex diagnoses and treatment journeys – helping them drive product adoption with hospitals and physicians.
These teams are going beyond basic sales pitches to become trusted advisors, using longitudinal patient-level data to show facilities their market share, treatment outcomes, and how new technology will create positive ROI. Care Journeys has also introduced two new features that are giving MedTech teams visibility into existing referral pathways, enabling them to develop new strategies for reaching more patients.
We are so proud of Megan, Cora, and the entire team behind this solution. They all clearly exemplify two of our core values: Build With Grit and Simplify and Innovate.
As Cora happily noted, “When you have good people, a clear problem, and the ambition to try new things, you get fantastic results.”
