Practo-Synapse- LinkedIn for Doctors

A content sharing global (doctors only) network

This was a start from the scratch project and not just a redesign, we were building the world's first online doctor network especially focused on knowledge sharing amongst peers and its subsidiaries like the pharma and fitness industry.

Practo makes healthcare accessible to millions of Indians. I joined the Synapse team as a senior designer in the middle of an ongoing development cycle so my first step was to understand the users and this industry better via dedicated research on doctors and understand their P2P networking needs and also the product-market fit from Practos's perspective so we can design better features for them and customize networking solutions for the entire healthcare industry.

The project type was B2B, we wanted the doctors to grow their practice via knowledge sharing on our platform and encourage peer-to-peer collaboration on a patient requirement basis.

Practo Synapse

• Practo Synapse is an idea to build a dedicated platform for doctors from all fields and medical students so they can learn and help each other grow professionally by sharing patient case studies, articles, referrals, and connect for collaborations like special surgeries, second opinion, etc.

• Practo is used by 4.5 million users across five countries. 50 million appointments are booked every year.

• Practo boasts of a massive set of 100,000+ verified doctors backed by 1.5 million+ patient recommendations.

• Most of Practo's products started with a simple idea like appointment booking but this time we tried to do something really big like the network effect because we have so many verified doctors registered on our platform so why not build a network around it.

What is the fundamental human need we are trying to solve with this product?

Doctors spend a considerable amount of time forming an offline network of other doctors, clinics, hospitals, associations, pharma companies, etc. Our surveys show that doctors strongly believe that other doctors are critical to them both at a professional and personal level. But traditional offline networks (mostly used for referring patients and sharing case studies) suffer from three problems:

Forming a network is tough as it requires one to dedicate time and effort

Extending an existing network has become difficult for doctors as competition has increased in smaller geographies (more doctors keep coming into the system) and offline networks are difficult to maintain across wider geographies (attending multiple association events/ conferences is not feasible)

Successful doctors with strong networks in particular locations have the aspiration to grow into new areas/ locations. Establishing this new network brings them back to square one they need to form a new network from scratch.

The biggest problem is that doctors are not able to leverage their personal offline networks completely and benefit from them. Existing online social networks are not built for this as well. So this is a big need: Help me leverage my personal network and benefit from it.

Only when doctors are able to leverage every aspect of their network, will they truly benefit across the entire spectrum of the Need to Want Pyramid:

Team & My role

• Timeline and duration: November 2015 - june 2016 (8 months)

• For this project, we had a team of 3 designers (myself and 2 junior visual designers), 2 project managers, and 6 developers.

• I coordinated and directed all the strategic facets of design including information architecture, user task flows, interaction, visual, product, mostly importantly research.

• I also conducted user research using methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and participatory design to address both user behavior and attitudes.

• Deliverables: Information architecture, style guide & design system, onboarding & login flow, and marketing material.

Context

Practo after getting C-series funding started working on this vision of creating this loop.

The plan was to create an ecosystem of healthcare offerings to connect consumers to providers.

However, the then-existing Business structure led to teams working in silos, they were all sandboxed and worked as mini-apps. so I had this challenge to understand the industry and its driving factors, power users and their mental model, and how their business works currently.

Challenge

Practo that time (2015) was India's top-funded healthcare startup and we were aggressively trying to productize every possible opportunity in that space without investing much time in research and planning. It was a big challenge to build something that user likes without spending much time analyzing the users and market needs.

1. Doctors are highly educated class of IT users who lead a very hectic stressful life with very little holidays and family time/spare time.

2. Healthcare domain has a lot of complexity, it's tough to understand it in 2-3 months.

3. There are 20+ doctor specialities ( Allergy and Immunology, Anesthesiology, Dermatology, Diagnostic Radiology, Emergency medicine, Family medicine, Internal medicine, Medical -genetics, Neurology, Nuclear medicine, Obstetrics and gynaecology, Ophthalmology, Pathology, Paediatrics, Physical medicine and rehabilitation, Preventive medicine, Psychiatry, Radiation Oncology, Surgery, Urology) and most of them have their unique treatments and diagnosis methods.

4. There was no user or market researcher in the company, so I took the initiative and started the UX research department

5. Understanding that different countries have different procedures for healthcare protocols like Insurance based treatments, reference via GP etc.

6. Most PM hires were 2-5 year experienced so a long-term planning mindset was missing.

7. We had no doctors or healthcare experts in the company to lead or guide us on prioritizing, implementing or testing ideas.

8. most people were not clear about the why of our product offering and value proposition.

9. Reports on network effects and network business models were our only starting point.

10. Doctors in general are very busy and non-tech-savvy people. It's very tough to find 1,000 qualified doctors and ask them to test your prototype or answer a survey for free.

11. Doctors generally don't take the business decisions in a hospital rather its the hospital admin staff so taking their perspective and understanding needs is also very critical

Solution

We kept the plan very simple, replicate the ideas from other products and test it in the Healthcare industry, see how much traction we get and keep building more of what is working. (build fast, fail fast approach)

I focused on the strategy part but as a team, we built things in parallel, for beta we decided to keep the UI design standard and took inspiration from global products like LinkedIn and Facebook for the basic feature to keep the learning curve very low for our users. (considering most doctors are already aware of these global networking platforms)

To start with we listed different sections of the product and discussed on the release priorities with higher management based on the fastest way to launch an MVP.

Information Architecture for Synapse Beta Launch

Web-app Launch

Mobile app - iOS Beta Launch

We also hired content writers to post some content regularly for doctors from our side as reference material. We started building the product in phases and released it initially for testing with only a few trusted group of doctors (10-20)

I was also curious to test our product concept at each stage so I began meeting doctors 1-1, showing them these mock screens and discussing this idea of online networking, their need for more connections, how they get more business, what is their growth metric and etc.

I fixed around 50 Doctor appointments, all 10 year+ experience in Bangalore city and outskirt areas.

talking mostly about their day-to-day challenges and IT requirements, most of these doctors were registered on Practo so i had extra opportunity to discuss other Practo products that they were already using, how is the overall customer sentiment regarding features, performance, pricing, etc.

I also designed marketing emails and fixed copy for better conversion via value proposition.

Onboarding via Sign-up Emailer

Idea 2: Bulk invite to get the entire organisation onboard.

Collaboration with brands like Cloudnine for to get their group of doctors make a private group on Synapse and use it as an internal communication tool for networking and socialising.

Testing the network product during 1-1 Doctor Interviews

In parallel with the development my focus was on user needs and finding the features that would really help doctors enjoy synapse.

I met the following doctors and prepared a presentation as a research outcome for the team.

Market Research: Other products for doctors' networking

Other existing platforms and groups for networking needs

After going through all the interviews and surveys, we gathered the following insights about doctors' lifestyle and networking needs

Research Results: We learnt the following things

Doctors prefer face to face networking over online and share patient data only with trusted partners/doctors and clinics.

Doctors already have strong trusted networks via medical colleges, hospitals, associations, and conferences.

Sitting long hours with their smartphones and PCs is not common for doctors, their lifestyle revolves around patients, emergency rooms, Operation Theatres, Lab-reports, and some travel so online work is rare, and thus the online network is not very suitable for most specialists and their lifestyle.

Doctors take their work and reputation very seriously primarily because it's a trust-based industry that works on goodwill and word-of-mouth publicity also no doctor wants to get into medico-legal issues via online miscommunication with any patient.

Many doctors asked us this question: Why would I (A Top Doctor) publish cases on Practo if I can have more recognition and visibility publishing them in Harvard Medical Journal? For which we had no concrete answers.

Product Future: Practo Management decided to discontinue Synapse after 6 months looking at this research outcome and adoption rate numbers.

Project Learnings and Takeaways

Doing customer research at the start of a project, even at very basic level can save you millions of dollars and valuable time.

When you are dealing with professionals and sophisticated users in a highly complex industry like healthcare, generalisation of user expectations and mental models is not a good idea to build your product upon.

The leaders of the team should also see the ground realities of the product in question.

We should be ready to question our base assumptions and dig deeper into the real problems worth solving than just following certain ongoing product trends.

What could have been better (strategically)

1. If we had a dedicated research team for this product from day one with mentorship from mid to senior-level doctors, we would have created a solid USP for this product in the market, productising the experience gathered from 100s of qualified doctors.

2. We could have focused on developing a few key features with top-notch quality instead of trying to do everything simultaneously focusing only on the customer acquisition.

3. We could have done it the Docplexus way by inviting KOLs (key opinion leaders) from the healthcare industry and let them create the content as per their community needs.

4. We could have empowered doctors as the moderators/owners of Synapse to manage this Network/community leading to improved healthcare outcomes by facilitating the exchange of patient cases and scientific dialogue through webinars and CMEs ( Conti. Med. Education ), as well as the latest clinical articles, guidelines, news, and more.

5. We could have approached healthcare associations as channel partners instead of targeting individual doctors for sharing their knowledge base which hampered our growth on quality and quantity of content in the initial days.

............ And thats how understanding your customer needs help you grow big .....................