Enabling Efficient Health Services for Patients & Team Members

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Context

During the pandemic, Walgreens pivoted to offering vaccines and health tests, but inefficient processes caused long wait times and patients being served out of order. The digital patient processing solution was underused—only 18% of patients completed paperwork beforehand, and just 5% of visits were fully digital, leaving 95% reliant on manual workarounds. To support expanding health services while maintaining prescriptions, the digital solution needed an upgrade to streamline team member workflows and honor patient appointment times.

Process

We started by analyzing the current state through interviews with team members from 10 pharmacies, uncovering system bugs and workflow gaps that limited adoption and patient trust. Next, I mapped 7 happy and unhappy path future-state service blueprints and facilitated ‘power hour’ with 10+ stakeholders to align design, product, and operations on key journeys, pain points, and opportunities. Finally, we ran four rounds of research—including ethnographic studies, prototype testing, and a pilot—to validate concepts, document actionable recommendations, and guide a nationwide scaling strategy.


Results

The solution scaled to 8K+ stores in a few months, with all critical recommendations implemented immediately and high-priority items added to near-term roadmaps. Team members remarked that is was one of the most successful workflow improvements implemented and appreciated the thorough ‘checklist style’ nature of the new process, while patients appreciated completing pre-work digitally and viewed the brand as more innovative. End-to-end adoption jumped to 70% (from ~5%), and NPS rose ~8 points compared to the previous peak respiratory season.

My Role
Lead Service Designer & User Researcher

Timeline
Fall 2023 - Summer 2024 | 10 Months

Methods
Service Blueprinting
Journey Mapping Workshops
Generative Interviews
Evaluative Interviews
Ethnographic Observations
Shop-Alongs

Current State Analysis

Qualitative interviews with 5 high- and 5 low-adopting digital stores as well as voice of the team member analysis revealed system bugs and lags were the primary driver for low TM adoption. Through this current-state research, we came to understand key sentiments across 3 main groups:

  • Technicians abandoned the workflow and resorted to a manual process because of technology lags and the pressure of patients standing in front of them in lines.

  • Pharmacists served patients out of order because of an unclear user interface, and they spent excessive time signing off on patients during the post-vaccination review.

  • Patients who completed the digital paperwork in advance were disappointed when their visit wasn’t smoother and faster than those who did not do pre-work.

Future State Service Blueprinting

Building on the vision for a check-in and team member queue concept, I mapped seven unique happy and unhappy path blueprints and facilitated “power hour” journey-mapping sessions. These sessions aligned product, design, and operations teams around the patient, technician, and pharmacist journeys, highlighting key pain points to monitor during the pilot. Insights from past research were integrated to inform stakeholders of likely behaviors based on similar prior concepts.

These blueprints not only created a shared understanding of the future state—enabling informed decision-making—but also served as a practical tool for UX designers, providing a holistic view of the team member work queue and guiding prototype development.

Future State Research and Pilots

4 rounds of in-person ethnographic and virtual evaluative research was completed to evaluate the current state, 2 rounds of prototypes, and pilot of the concept before scaling nationwide, speaking with 50+ Walgreens’ team members and 19 patients throughout. Taking learnings and open questions from blueprints and prior virtual research sessions, the pilot research plan included key questions and the method for analysis (e.g., interview, observation, metric, etc.). Research was presented to 10+ ops, product, and UX stakeholders after every round, documenting recommendations ranging from critical to low. After qualitative research, I collaborated with the quantitative insights team to create survey questions.

Key Learnings

Bringing Teammates Along the Service Design Journey

The value of a service blueprint is only as good as the understanding it brings to stakeholders, many of which had not had as much familiarity with blueprints before and found them unapproachable to dig into. Walking teams through the blueprint as it evolved would have enabled earlier feedback, stronger shared ownership, and helped UX designers think more constructively about prototypes and the questions they needed to work to answer.


Designing for Real-World Constraints

Although field team members had mostly positive reactions to the new process, its success depended on unresolved systemic constraints, including limited in-store Wi-Fi. Without addressing these foundational issues, adoption risk increased despite strong product vision. Surfacing these infrastructure gaps, and the real-world team member sentiments behind them, might have better supported long-term adoption.