One service we launched during the pandemic was COVID Ready: a program meant to help businesses return to work safely while keeping employees healthy during the pandemic. COVID Ready combines COVID-19 testing, monitoring, contact tracing, and medical oversight in a customizable package for a variety of employers. Since the program’s mid-2020 launch, we’ve been fortunate to be able to help hundreds of businesses — and tens of thousands of employees — in a wide range of industries: from manufacturing and sports to biotech and film.
For this service to work smoothly, we needed (in addition to high-quality tools and data for employers) a way for employees to enroll, book visits, see test results, manage their private health data, and more. During this period, we’ve mostly treated employees as a type of patient (which they are). As we expand into more employer services like occupational health, workers’ compensation, and employer paid services, we’re building out employee-specific tooling. The first step is elevating the employee onboarding flow into a tier 1 experience.
Our COVID Ready registration flow for employees borrowed heavily from our existing patient registration flow, which resulted in low employee enrollment rates and a bunch of errors. As a result, a meaningful proportion of employees would end up not being linked to their employer, and they wouldn’t be recognized as employees when they showed up at a clinic. In addition, they’d sometimes accidentally get billed for services that should have been covered by the organization, and (where applicable) their COVID-19 test results would not be visible in the employer dashboard.
Going in, we believed that a few things were driving this dynamic:
• A lengthy registration flow that required too many user inputs
• Asking employees to enter information we already had about them
• Not recognizing patients when we already knew who they were
• A need to clean up edge cases, like enabling an existing patient to associate their account with the employer, instead of forcing a new registration
To solve these problems, we simplified the registration flow down to three steps, from more than 12 steps. We replaced SMS verification with an expiring, one-time-use unique link and code, which solved for some fragility we observed, as employees would sometimes share their invitation links with colleagues who asked (or simply hadn’t been enrolled yet). We also began pre-filling employee information where applicable, once the employee was verified, and introduced a new, simplified privacy module to make clearer what employees were consenting to share with their employer, and what stayed private with their provider.
More tools for employees are coming soon. As always, please send questions or concerns here.
