Healthcare Scheduling Ecosystem

Designing and evolving a multi-surface scheduling platform supporting millions of healthcare appointments.

Years
2024-Present

Company
Kroger Heath

  • Kroger Health & Wellness offers pharmacy and clinic services across thousands of locations nationwide. Appointment scheduling is a critical entry point to care—supporting vaccinations, clinical visits, and ongoing patient services.

    The scheduling experience spans multiple surfaces:

    • Customer-facing web and mobile experiences

    • In-store kiosk flows

    • Associate and clinician tools used by pharmacy and clinic teams

    As demand increased—particularly during peak vaccine seasons—the existing scheduling system struggled to support growing complexity, operational constraints, and evolving patient needs.

  • Product Designer — Health & Wellness

    I served as the lead designer for the scheduling experience, owning end-to-end UX across customer, kiosk, and associate tools. My work focused on shaping the experience strategy, interaction models, and workflow patterns that connected these surfaces into a cohesive system.

    Scope included:

    • Customer scheduling journeys (web + mobile)

    • In-store kiosk scheduling

    • Associate and clinician scheduling tools

    • Cross-surface logic for eligibility, availability, and capacity

    I partnered closely with product management, engineering, analytics, pharmacy operations, clinic teams, and compliance, navigating both technical and regulatory constraints.

  • Scheduling in healthcare is rarely simple. At Kroger, the system needed to balance:

    • Complex eligibility rules

    • Real-time inventory and staffing constraints

    • Multi-patient and family scheduling needs

    • High seasonal demand (especially vaccines)

    • Consistency across customer and associate experiences

    From a user perspective, this complexity showed up as:

    • Confusing service selection

    • Unclear availability

    • High drop-off during critical steps

    • Increased burden on pharmacy teams due to rework and clarification

    From a business perspective, inefficiencies directly impacted:

    • Appointment completion

    • Vaccine volume

    • Operational strain at store level

  • Rather than treating these as isolated UX issues, I approached scheduling as a system.

    My work centered on:

    • Mapping end-to-end workflows across surfaces

    • Identifying decision points where users lost confidence

    • Clarifying system logic without oversimplifying constraints

    • Creating scalable patterns that could evolve with the platform

    This resulted in a series of focused initiatives that incrementally improved the ecosystem.

Key Initiatives

Vaccine Selection Optimization

Problem
Customers struggled to understand vaccine options, eligibility requirements, and service differences—leading to hesitation and abandonment early in the flow.

Approach
I worked with analytics and product partners to identify where users stalled, then redesigned vaccine selection to reduce cognitive load and clarify decision-making.

Solution Highlights

  • Simplified option presentation

  • Clearer eligibility and service explanations

  • More confident handoff into appointment selection

Impact

  • Reduced early-stage confusion

  • Improved flow completion during high-volume periods

Before

After

Multi-Patient Vaccine Scheduling

Problem
The existing scheduler assumed one patient per appointment, making it difficult for families and caregivers to book together—especially during flu and COVID seasons.

Approach
I led the redesign of the scheduling flow to support multi-patient booking, coordinating closely with engineering, analytics, pharmacy operations, and compliance.

Solution Highlights

  • Streamlined multi-patient flow across devices

  • Reduced form repetition and unnecessary steps

  • Improved clarity around availability and constraints

Impact

  • 46% reduction in customer drop-off

  • +12% year-over-year increase in vaccines administered

  • +27% year-over-year market share growth during peak season

Appointment Time Selection Redesign

Problem
Customers lacked confidence when selecting appointment times due to unclear availability rules and inconsistent messaging across surfaces. Associates also faced downstream friction when expectations didn’t match reality.

Approach
I partnered with product, engineering, and analytics to rethink how availability and constraints were communicated—focusing on transparency without overwhelming users.

Solution Highlights

  • Simplified time-slot presentation

  • Contextual messaging explaining availability and restrictions

  • Alignment between customer and associate views to reduce rework

Impact

  • Improved appointment selection confidence

  • Reduced rescheduling and clarification at the store level

  • Established a reusable pattern for future scheduling flows

Outcomes & Impact

Across these initiatives, the scheduling ecosystem became:

  • Easier for customers to navigate

  • More resilient during peak demand

  • Clearer and more efficient for pharmacy and clinic teams

Key outcomes included:

  • Significant drop-off reduction

  • Increased vaccine volume

  • Improved operational alignment across teams

  • Scalable patterns adopted across additional services

What I learned

Designing healthcare systems at scale reinforced the importance of:

  • Treating workflows as interconnected systems, not isolated screens

  • Designing for both customers and the teams supporting them

  • Making constraints visible in ways that build trust, not friction

  • Partnering deeply across disciplines to navigate ambiguity

What’s next

Future opportunities include:

  • Expanding scheduling patterns to additional services

  • Further personalization based on user history and eligibility

  • Continued alignment between digital experiences and in-store operations