Designing a Modern Appointments Experience for 10X Health
Healthcare
WebApp
Company
10X Health is a health and wellness company known for its genetic testing and personalized health programs. I was hired as the sole designer to help build core patient portal features as the company transitioned away from a white-label platform to a custom built experience.
Challenge
Translating complex backend appointment data—much of it designed for internal clinical workflows—into a safe, patient-facing experience that allows users to view appointments, access visit summaries, and join Telehealth sessions without confusion or compliance risk.
Result
Reduced the risk of exposing internal, non-compliant appointment data by defining a patient-safe appointment model that is scalable and user centered.
Team
VP of Clinical Operations
VP of Technology
Principal Architect
Product Manager
4x Developers
Skills
UX & Interaction Design
Systems & Data Discovery
Healthcare Product Design
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Understanding the Problem Space
This feature aimed to provide standard patient portal functionality—letting patients view upcoming and past appointments and access their visit summaries in one place. While the goal was simple, the path to get there wasn’t. Building this experience at 10X required deep discovery across an unfamiliar EHR and backend system to ensure the final interface was a valuable MVP for patients, clinicians, and the business alike.
The primary entities I was solving for were the clinical department’s workflows, the constraints of existing data in the EHR, patient needs and stakeholder expectations. This design required alot of communication across departments, with stakeholders across four domains that would all have input and a say into the final design.
Clinical Workflow Issues
Clinicians manually need to resend telehealth links, appointment summaries and even appointment history when patients cant find them.
Why this is important: Patients need to jump through hoops to attain information that should be accessible in a portal. In addition, this creates manual workflows for 10X clinicians, resulting in salaried hours for something that shouldn’t be necessary.
Clinical staff will create appointments in the EHR that are for internal use only. An example would be setting an appointment time to call a patient as part of a follow-up procedure. Without appropriate API paramaters, internal data could flow into the user's appointment history.
Why this is important: Leaking internal system data can raise anxiety and mistrust within patients.
Appointment statuses were numerous, and most were not relevant to patients
Why this is important: Many of these statuses are designed for internal use only and showing these, like internal use appointments can lead to mistrust.
Database Constraints
The EHR only supported two appointment types (“In-clinic” and “Telehealth”), while 10X offered a third — Concierge. We have no way to accurately label ‘Concierge’ as an appointment type for patients within the portal.
Why this is important: This premium, white glove service is a primary revenue creator for 10X Health and should be represented this way within the portal.
The EHR only stores appointment times in Eastern Standard Time, despite many appointments on Pacific Standard Time and Mountain Standard Time.
Why this is important: If the appointment time and timezone is not properly adjusted to the patients timezone, this could cause missed appointments.
The EHR may change in the near future, so this design needs to be adaptable.
Why this is important: Data will need to flow in reliably without a major redesign of the feature.
Positive Findings
Providers, appointment duration and some basic visit details were available and accurate.
Telehealth links were available for use.
There is an opportunity to give patients upcoming procedure details about their appointments within the portal. For example, if they need to fast or not and for how long. This would help bolster patient safety and appointment success.
Design Process
I started with quick notebook sketches and early wireframes to map the flow and pressure-test the details. That surfaced questions I needed to resolve with stakeholders across clinical, operations, and engineering—especially where backend constraints could affect the patient experience. To avoid surprises at handoff, I reviewed the early direction with multiple stakeholders and iterated until the requirements and edge cases were clear.
Once the key constraints were understood, I moved into high fidelity. While we already had a design system in place, this feature expanded it in meaningful ways and set patterns I knew we’d reuse in future layouts—so I spent extra time refining the visual and interaction details.
Appointment status
Working alongside stakeholders, we dove into the progression stages an appointment can go through within the EHR. At the end of the day, we wanted to show upcoming and completed appointments. This meant translating many internal statuses to delegate the appointment in one of those two categories.
If an appointment was cancelled, rescheduled or otherwise not deemed 'completed' - it would not show.
Appointment profiles & critical visit information
I partnered with clinical to define which appointment types should appear in the portal - the API would focus these only. Internal use appointments would not show for patients.
In addition, we collaborated on required visit instructions—such as fasting, ID requirements, and arrival guidance—in a compliant, patient-friendly way.
Planning for Future EHR Changes
During discovery and data exploration with the clinical team, we uncovered the need to restructure how Concierge appointments were tracked in the EHR. While this change couldn’t be implemented before our design deadline, I worked with clinical and our Product Manager to plan how the design will change once Concierge appointments could be accurately represented in the UI.
Final Cross-Functional Alignment
During discovery, I uncovered several cross-department inconsistencies that could have significantly impacted the final design. Within the clinical team, there were differing assumptions about a potential EHR restructuring—specifically whether multiple procedures would eventually be nested under a single appointment. Because this would fundamentally change how appointment data was represented in the UI, we needed clarity before moving forward.
At the same time, marketing and clinical were using different naming conventions for office locations, creating uncertainty around what patients should see in the portal. There were also ongoing conversations about a possible migration to a new EHR, raising broader questions about how stable the current data structures were and whether the design needed to anticipate a future system shift.
Bringing these discussions into a shared forum allowed us to align on what was confirmed, what was speculative, and what could safely move forward—ensuring the feature was built on stable assumptions rather than informal or conflicting narratives.
Solutions
Final Designs
Outcomes
The Appointments experience became one of the first foundational features of the new 10X portal. This required careful coordination across clinical, engineering, and leadership to translate EHR data into a secure patient portal, something patients could comfortably rely on in an interface, a challenge the company had not yet faced at the time.
The project also encouraged cross-team alignment:
• Clinical adjusted appointment structures to better support digital use
• Marketing and clinical aligned on naming conventions
• Engineering streamlined how appointment data was returned via API
Patients now have a single place to understand their appointments, and teams have clearer internal structures supporting them. This feature also set the groundwork for future portal capabilities that require consistent patient-facing data.