Evolent’s Patient Chart is used by care managers, nurses, and providers across both the payer and provider sides of the business. The product was undergoing a platform migration that required a full front-end rebuild, but backend changes were off-limits due to tech debt. This created a unique opportunity: the engineering team was rewriting the UI, but the underlying data structures and APIs could not be touched.
As the UX lead for the Patient Chart redesign, my role was to simplify confusing layouts, reduce cognitive load, and streamline workflows within these constraints. The development teams needed pixel-perfect Axure prototypes in under two months, which required fast decision-making, clarity of intent, and extremely tight collaboration with Product and Engineering.
• UX Lead for redesign of Patient Chart module.
• Identified hidden affordances and cognitive-load issues through heuristic evaluation and clinical insight.
• Selected and adapted patterns based on workflow needs and data constraints.
• Advocated for usability while collaborating across Product, Engineering, and clinical stakeholders.
• Conducted user interviews, observed live workflows, and delivered detailed Axure prototypes.
• Contributed new components and patterns to the design system.
I focused on delivering impactful improvements with minimal development team lift. I evaluated pages based on best practices, shadowed case managers during live workflows, and created mock-ups to share with stakeholders.
To avoid late-stage surprises, I established regular working sessions with the Product Owner, and aligned with her early and often. My prototypes gave developers absolute clarity, enabling smooth handoff and efficient execution.
The Patient Summary page was designed to give users a high-level orientation to a patient by listing demographic, provider, eligibility, and risk information in one place However, the page presented this information without hierarchy or clinical context, making it difficult to quickly understand what was important.
• No information hierarchy; difficult to understand what matters at a glance.
• Mixed administrative, clinical, and provider data without workflow alignment.
• Key datapoints buried among irrelevant and “Not Available” fields.
• High-effort scanning with no sense of patient story or trajectory.
Working within project constraints, I reorganized the same data into a structured, scannable layout that reduced cognitive load and established a foundation for accessibility and design-system consistency.
• Card-based grouping aligned with information architecture best practices.
• Improved readability and typographic hierarchy.
• Hover/focus states to support discoverability and accessibility to screen-readers.
• Meaningful data sections with preserved underlying data models.
While the project constraints limited me to reorganizing the existing data, my background as a clinician allowed me to identify deeper opportunities. The concept redesign below illustrates what becomes possible when I’m empowered to apply clinical judgment, FHIR-informed thinking, and strategic UX to create a more meaningful patient summary.
REDESIGN: CLINICAL CLARITY AT A GLANCE
Leveraging my clinical background, I reframed the page as a true patient summary that highlights alerts, care gaps, diagnoses, and encounter patterns. This allows providers to see the important parts of a patient's story and supports faster, safer clinical understanding.
• Designed a FHIR-aligned patient timeline to surface patterns and context, not just data.
• Elevated clinically meaningful information (alerts, flags, care gaps, diagnoses).
• Organized the page to mirror actual clinical reasoning and triage workflow.
• Shifted product from “data display” to “insight delivery,” enabling better decisions.
Patient Flags Page
CRITICAL INFO SHOULD BE AVAILABLE AT A GLANCE
On the Flags screen, one issue stood out immediately: critical information was hidden behind affordances so subtle that I used the software for over a week before discovering the information boxes were actually accordion headers. When opened, the accordions revealed almost the exact same content shown in their headers, giving a strong signal that the information should never have been hidden in the first place.
The legacy design also required multiple page loads to view Active Flags, Inactive Flags, or to add a new one. These transitions not only cost time, but removed all context, making users complete tasks blind to the larger picture.
KEY DECISION POINT: ELIMINATING HIDDEN AFFORDANCES
Recognizing that users needed to see all flag information at once, I made a decisive shift away from accordions and toward a card-based layout. Cards allowed for:
immediate visibility
better scanning
inline editing
and a single-page workflow
The backend and FHIR standards dictated the fields on each card, but I enhanced clarity by eliminating the unnecessary interaction of accordions and adding color-coded and labeled status pills to make Active versus Inactive flags unmistakable at a glance.
EVALUATING THE DIRECTION OF CHANGE
I brought early card mockups to a stakeholder meeting and walked through the updated workflow. Users immediately responded to the clarity and the ability to see Active and Inactive flags together. The Product Owner and raised feasibility questions, which I resolved by reusing existing components and keeping the "Add New" button in its original place. Even without formal usability testing, this fast-feedback loop ensured alignment and delivered a solution that felt both intuitive and achievable.
KEY DECISION POINT: ALLOWING USERS TO REFERENCE CONTEXT
One of the most challenging constraints was redesigning the Add New Flag flow so it could happen on the same page. My goal was to ensure that when users added a new flag, they didn’t lose visibility of the existing ones. To solve this, I designed the Add New flow to open as a compact card at the top of the list, pushing all other cards downward while keeping the entire context visible. It required careful balancing of space and readability, but the result allowed users to complete tasks without navigating away.
Allergies Page
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATTERN FOR THE WORKFLOW
The original Allergies page relied on the same accordion-heavy pattern used throughout the legacy product. Key information was hidden behind hover-only affordances: the caret indicating expand/collapse only appeared when the user hovered over the header, making the interaction undiscoverable and inaccessible. This violated core heuristics around visibility, predictability, and affordances.
I had encountered the same issue on other pages (see original Flags page) and tried to eliminate the pattern.
KEY DECISION POINT: KEEP ALLERGY ACCORDIONS
In Flags, switching to a card layout solved discoverability and workflow issues, so I initially explored applying the same solution to Allergies. However, each Allergy contains more information than a Flag , and compressing them into a uniform card size didn't work upon editing. The accordion pattern offered the needed space.
To improve efficiency while keeping the accordion, I added a surface-level action button that provides quick access to the two most common interactions: Edit and Active ↔︎ Voided status changes. This allowed users to update allergies without opening the accordion, reducing steps and making high-frequency actions immediately accessible.
WORKFLOW MATTERS
The most important workflow on this page was the Add New Allergy action. Unlike Flags, adding a new allergy requires substantial structured input. I redesigned this flow so that the “New Allergy” form expands at the top of the page, staying above the fold and keeping existing Allergies visible beneath it. This preserves user context while still providing a full, spacious input area.
KEY DECISION POINT: "GOOD ENOUGH"
I strongly recommended replacing the hover-only caret with a persistent indicator to make the accordion discoverable. However, the Product Owner and case management stakeholders preferred the hover behavior, saying they were “used to it” and felt the persistent icon looked “cluttered.”
Without a quantifiable business case to require the change, I aligned with stakeholder preference. This reflects an important aspect of design work: advocating for better UX while understanding when constraints, timelines, and stakeholder priorities outweigh pattern purity.
Project Outcomes
PRODUCT DESIGN SUCCESS
Good healthcare design is not just about making better screens. It’s about supporting people who are navigating mountains of data and giving them back time to focus on their next human interaction.
This redesign improved usability across clinical workflows, achieved fast wins with minimal dev lift, and introduced scalable design patterns for data-dense desktop screens, delivering real impact at enterprise scale.
LEARNINGS
During this project, I saw in practice how small design shifts can drive real usability gains at scale. I also learned to negotiate design tradeoffs with Product Owners to create optimal business outcomes with less than ideal UX patterns.