SpineHealthie App Design

The Endoscopic Spine Research Group (ESRG) at the University of Washington asked me to design a mobile app that allows patients to efficiently track their recovery progress from spine surgery, and to provide communication tools that allow for personalized and effective recovery management between patients and surgeons. The app needed to be easy to navigate and user-friendly for post-op patients.

Together with a visual designer and back-end developer, we designed and built SpineHealthie, a mobile app that tracks patients' rehabilitation from spine surgery, facilitates ongoing two-way communication between patients and surgeons, and provides a personalized recovery program for patients. By regularly tracking inputs from patients, we could map their recovery progress and allow their surgeon to offer real-time advice. We aimed to optimize for the emergence of telehealth during the pandemic by providing easy and accessibly patient-doctor consultations, while improving upon the traditional recovery journey through efficient and personalized patient experiences.

Through weekly working sessions across several design and development sprints, our small team quickly created the core needs of the app experience:

• Designing a brand and look & feel for SpineHealthie and its app and web screens
• Mapping the end-to-end patient journey and determining the experience requirements
• Wireframing and visually designing all required screens including onboarding flows, a patient dashboard, patient surveys, and app- and web-based surgeon monitoring tools
• Translating the flows and designs into a functional build

We were able to have a production-ready product within three months of beginning our work, allowing the ESRG team to begin testing the experience with real patients.

We successfully piloted the SpineHealthie app with eight teams of surgeons, nurses, and research staff located across seven different hospitals throughout the US. The SpineHealthie app is now available on the App Store and Google Play store, and has received positive feedback from users for its ease of use and helpfulness in tracking recovery progress. The app has served as a successful proof-of-concept and has bolstered the ESRG’s ongoing efforts toward creating a suite of products for personalized telehealth solutions.