case study 04 / 05 - healthtech

Solis - hospital request intake & analytics

An intake portal and analytics dashboard that gave a hospital network operations team structure and visibility over equipment and service requests - without forcing an abrupt cutover from email and phone.

Client
Solis - a global medical technology company
Role
Lead Product Designer
Industry
Healthcare / MedTech Operations
Platform
Web, B2B SaaS
01 - the challenge

Requests came in by phone and email, with no structure behind either.

Solis's hospital network partners submitted equipment and service requests by email and phone, with no structured system behind either channel. Critical details - what was needed, by when, for which department - regularly went missing, delaying fulfillment. Solis needed to move hospitals onto a system, but couldn't just flip a switch: requests were still going to arrive the old way for a long transition period, and losing visibility into those wasn't an option.

02 - research & insights

This wasn't purely a design problem - it was change management.

Mapping the as-is journey (phone call or email → manual logging → assignment) showed exactly where information died.

  • Unstructured phone notes, missed email attachments, no confirmation trail back to the requester.
  • Hospital staff were used to old methods and behavior so the solution had to be compatible with their existing workflows.
Before
phone call or email

No structured fields - priority and department are implied, not captured.

manual logging

Details re-typed into shared docs by hand. Attachments and context easily dropped.

assignment

No confirmation trail back to the requester - status lives in someone's inbox.

After
portal submission

Structured fields capture facility, department, priority, and need-by date up front.

auto-acknowledgment

Requester gets instant confirmation while the intake team focuses on the actual work.

structured triage

Routed by request type and priority with full context attached.

tracked fulfillment

Status visible end-to-end - legacy email/phone requests included, not left behind.

03 - key decisions

Design for the transition period, not just the end state.

  • Designed a structured intake system with defined fields to replace free-text email requests going forward.
  • Include automatic email replies to acknowledge receipt of requests, triage the requests, and provide status updates while the intake team focus on the actual request work.
  • Built an analytics dashboard that ingested Solis's historical email and voice request data, so the team retained visibility into legacy-channel requests during the transition.
  • Supported both old and new channels at once rather than forcing an abrupt cutover.
04 - impact

big impact

05 - learnings

Designing for the in-between stage of a migration takes a different skill set - it's easy to design the "after" state; the harder problem is making sure people don't lose ground while they're still relying on old habits.

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