Selected Work
By Paul Tomanpos, Jr.
Family Health Tracker
Modernizing Adherence Tracking
Delivers assurance to caregivers managing dependents and targets compliance visibility for healthcare providers through an AI-enhanced platform.
Responsibilities
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Product Strategy & Scoping
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User Research & Synthesis
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UI/Visual Design
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Interaction Design (IxD)
Summary
The Family Health Tracker (FHT) is an independent project I designed from the ground up.
It’s a centralized mobile platform originally intended for general family health management. The project underwent a strategic pivot during the MVP phase to specialize as an adherence management tool. Its primary value proposition is ensuring medication adherence and compliance with prescribed treatment plans for all dependents (children, spouses, elderly parents). By leveraging user-centered design, in-depth user research, and AI-powered features, FHT provides tailored experiences for caregivers, dependents and providers, addressing critical clinical efficiency and adherence challenges.
Problem Framing
The core challenge addressed was the difficulty in securing and validating patient compliance once a provider establishes a treatment plan. This challenge impacts both the quality of care and the efficiency of clinical review.
| Target User Role | Pain Point | Success Metric (KPI) |
| Dependent User / Routine Manager (e.g., Jill O’Connell) | Difficulty maintaining adherence and staying motivated due to the complexity of logging multiple daily health activities (medications, exercises, stretches) and the lack of a clear connection between their sustained daily efforts and long-term health trends. | The Dependent gains a sense of control and motivation by easily logging adherence using the simple check-off functionality on the Routines task list. Success is validated when the Reports/Data Screen and AI Insights show a positive correlation, confirming that consistent adherence directly translates into solid positive health changes (e.g., “Do I see better vitals in weeks when I exercise more?”). |
| Caregiver (James “Jim” O’Connell) | Lacks assurance that dependents (e.g., adult dependent Jill, or elderly dependent Elena) are consistently adhering to daily routines and medications. | Achieve “peace of mind” and feel “at ease” regarding the dependent’s consistent care. |
| Provider (Dr. Sarah Lee) | Requires streamlined workflows to quickly verify patient compliance and access comprehensive health summaries across a high caseload. | Ability to confirm 100% adherence to treatment plans with as little cognitive friction as possible. |
Role & Approach
My Role: As an independent project, I served as the product owner, manager and lead UX/UI Designer, responsible for defining user strategy, and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) feature set, creating responsive low-fidelity prototypes, and establishing the system architecture using fundamentals established in the Atomic Design methodology.
Methodology (Systems Thinking & User-Centered Design):
- User-Centered Definition: The process involved creating detailed personas (Caregiver Jim, Provider Dr. Lee, Dependent Jill) and comprehensive user journeys (using FigJam) to visualize the emotional and functional needs of each user type, ensuring the design centered on adherence flows.
- Scalable Design System: The application was built on Brad Frost’s Atomic Design methodology in Figma. This system uses modular components (Atoms, Molecules, Organisms) to ensure the UI is highly scalable and consistent, which is crucial when designing role-based views for providers and caregivers managing diverse health data.
- Data-Driven Prototyping: Low-fidelity wireframes were used to establish efficient layouts. A key practice was populating all prototypes with realistic content derived directly from defined data structures (e.g., Medication Entry fields, Growth Charts data points) rather than using filler text like Lorem Ipsum. This ensured accurate representation of content length, hierarchy, and data visualization needs.
Strategic Pivot: The MVP scope was intentionally streamlined by removing complexity (like the Appointment Entry functionality) to prioritize and refine the Routines feature, establishing a clear value proposition in adherence management.
Development of Detailed Personas and User Journeys for a full picture of primary users—an essential step in designing user-centered products!
Solution & Design Highlights
The FHT solution focuses on facilitating compliance, securing data exchange, and improving clinical efficiency through role-specific features.
A. Core Feature: Routines (Adherence Management)
The strategic introduction of the Routines feature converted FHT into a dedicated adherence tool. Routines function as a daily task manager, generating a checklist for routine health activities (medications, stretches, exercises).
B. Role-Based Views and Clinical Efficiency
The app utilizes Role-Based Views to streamline the workflows for different user types.
Regular/Dependent View (Jill or Jim):
The Home/Dashboard View for a dependent or regular user acts as the central hub for daily routines. Routines are grouped by time of day: Morning, Afternoon and Evening, utilizing Progressive Disclosure so users don’t get overwhelmed with the day’s tasks/routines.
Caregiver View (Jim):
The Caregiver view is similar to the standard view, but includes summary information about dependents. Essentially, it is information found on a regular user’s reports view.
Provider View (Dr. Lee):
Strategic Pivot: Deprioritizing Dedicated Provider Screens
The initial design for the Family Health Tracker (FHT) application included a full Role-Based View for healthcare providers (such as Dr. Sarah Lee), complete with dedicated UI elements on the Home/Dashboard View, Detail View, and AI Chatbot Interface, intended to streamline their workflow. This structure, however, was strategically deprioritized for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
The decision stemmed from recognizing that implementing a completely separate system for providers would introduce significant obstacles, including substantial security concerns when managing thousands of patient records. Critically, providers already rely on existing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) like Epic; requiring them to download and manage yet another system simply to access FHT data was deemed impractical and unlikely to encourage adoption.
This pivot allows the FHT MVP to maintain a singular focus on the core user experience (the caregiver and dependent) while still addressing the provider’s central need: verification of treatment compliance. The app pivoted to function primarily as an adherence management tool centered around the Routines feature, which generates vital data on actual medication adherence and compliance with treatment plans.
This information closes a critical gap, as existing EHR systems often only track if prescriptions were picked up, not if the patient is actually taking their medications or performing their exercises/routines.
To deliver this necessary data, the MVP solution relies on the caregiver (like Jim O’Connell) to export a file or screen containing the adherence metrics from the Reports/Data Screen to share directly with the physician.
Note: Dedicated Provider screens may be reserved for a future feature, potentially exploring integrations that allow adherence reports (e.g., PDFs) to be uploaded into EHR systems, similar to lab results.
C. AI Chatbot Interface for Support
The integrated AI Chatbot Interface minimizes administrative burden and offers helpful insights based on adherence data and recorded vitals.
- For Caregivers (Jim/Maria): The chatbot answers questions about common illnesses, offers guidance on medication interactions, and manages reminders.
- This highlights the AI’s role in improving efficiency and offering immediate support.
Validated Design Outcomes & Strategic Impact
The design phase for the Family Health Tracker (FHT) achieved significant outcomes primarily through a strategic pivot, refocusing the application from a general health history repository to a specialized adherence management tool.
This pivot addressed core user and business needs while ensuring product feasibility for an MVP:
- Validation of Treatment Compliance: The design successfully validated the app’s capability to fill a critical gap in the healthcare workflow. By centering the app around the new Routines feature, which generates a structured daily checklist for health activities like medications and exercises, the system directly produces compliance data. This data allows providers (like Dr. Sarah Lee) to efficiently verify compliance with treatment plans. This is crucial because existing Electronic Health Records (EHRs), such as Epic, often only track if a medication was picked up, not if the patient is actually taking their medications or performing their routines.
- Strategic Efficiency and Pivot on Provider Role: Another significant strategic result is the decision to deprioritize dedicated Provider Role screens for the MVP. Implementing separate provider interfaces was deemed impractical due to high administrative overhead, potential security issues when managing thousands of patient records, and low guaranteed adoption, as physicians already rely on complex EHR systems. Instead, the design validated a temporary solution: caregivers (like Jim O’Connell) can export a file or screen of adherence data to share with the provider, bypassing the need for providers to download and manage a separate FHT account.
- Design Process Efficacy and Scalability: The project utilized user-centered design principles and Atomic Design methodology, which proved highly effective in maintaining scalability and consistency. The use of low-fidelity prototyping (wireframes) established efficient layouts and workflows early in the process. Furthermore, the employment of generative AI tools (like ChatGPT) was key to generating and vetting realistic use cases and refining user journeys, ensuring the final design accurately served the complex needs of the caregiver (Jim O’Connell) and dependent (Jill O’Connell).
Future Strategy & Iterations
The future roadmap for FHT builds directly upon the established foundation of adherence data and streamlined design, focusing on advanced AI functionality and integration strategy:
Feature Refinements and Enhancements
Planned iterations include:
- Hi-Fidelity Clickable Prototype and comprehensive Visual Design
- Refining the Reports/Data Screen visualizations to provide more detailed visual charts and graphs that display adherence patterns over time.
- A “like” or “heart” micro-interaction will be implemented for the Caretaker, allowing the Caretaker (Jim O’Connell) to quickly acknowledge and validate adherence status of dependents for the morning, afternoon, and evening routine segments, thereby reinforcing his “peace of mind”.
Features deprioritized for the MVP, such as the tracking of appointments, vaccination history, and growth charts, will be considered for reintroduction in future releases once the core adherence platform is stable.
Advanced AI Insights and Correlation Analysis:
A primary future step is to leverage the adherence and health metric data (including blood pressure, weight, and medication compliance) to generate powerful, personalized AI Insights. The AI Chatbot will be enhanced to move beyond simple summaries and analyze correlations, answering sophisticated user questions such as:
- “When I miss medication, how much does my blood pressure rise?” or
- “Are my best weeks linked to specific routines (time of day, activity type)?”.
- This analysis directly addresses the key user question: “Are these meds and exercises making a difference?”.
External Provider Integration Strategy
Given the intentional removal of dedicated provider screens for the MVP, the long-term strategy focuses on integration rather than replication.
Future versions will explore mechanisms for the Caregiver to export adherence reports (suchs as PDFs) directly from the FHT app, allowing this critical compliance information to be securely uploaded into the provider’s existing EHR systems (like Epic), similar to how lab results are managed.