3D representation of foot used to avoid graphic content
My role
Hike Medical, a healthtech venture within CPO, delivers personalized foot care to patients across America. As the founding designer and fourth employee, I led the development of AI-powered clinical tools while helping the company find product-market fit. I owned the end-to-end design process for our core products and offerings, working closely with cross-functional teams of engineers, clinicians, and product managers. My role expanded beyond design to include shaping product strategy, defining our roadmap, building team culture, and hiring key early employees.
Role: Founding UX Designer
Duration: June 2023 - Present
Impact on care delivery
Increasing reach to remote patients
I designed solutions that enabled elderly patients to get medicare health benefits from the comfort of their home.
Empowering family owned clinics
As our product matured, my work led to partnerships with family owned clinics in under represented communities.
Reducing time to care
On average 15 mins were saved by clinicians per patient encounter. Reducing administrative tasks and enabling healthcare providers to focus on patients.
Driving affordable & sustainable healthcare
Our work helped reduce costs for clinics, and we are the first adopters of FDM 3D printing using recyclable materials for custom orthotics in the industry
CPO is one of the largest Medicare diabetic foot care providers. Foot health is often neglected, especially by older adults living alone. Many people don't seek help until serious problems develop, creating a cycle where poor foot health makes it harder to receive care. Regular check-ups are important, but mobility issues can make doctor visits difficult. This is concerning because foot ulcers significantly lower life expectancy, and our work aimed at providing early diagnosis services nationwide.
Our feet ground us and are often the cause of lower musculoskeletal issues.
(Generated using Midjourney)
Learning through iteration
I drove the team towards building and shipping a MVP version of our product as quickly as possible while maintaining quality. As part of an early stage team, I understood that we had limited time and engineering resources. to test ideas. Iterating quickly, we needed users to try our product as early as possible since this is the best way to identify the real problems we should address, and add maximum value.
To maintain model accuracy, I designed the Trusted Tester program and enrolled a large number of clinicians, with accuracy, to cross check model detections and test new updates.
Improving patient outcomes by detecting pathologies early and accurately.
I designed an initial experience to collect clinical data and train our models on real-world datasets.
This resulted in the beta launch of our initial pathology detection models, which are enabling patients to scan for pathologies from the comfort of their home.
*3D foot placeholder used to avoid using graphic images. Please reach out for more.
I launched a large-scale data collection study across 50+ clinics to address the lack of quality information, accelerating the training process by gathering crucial data points. Additionally, I collaborated with clinicians to gain insights into their complex workflow, enhancing our understanding of real-world challenges and opportunities.
Clinicians can document patient pathologies with integrated photo annotation tool for comprehensive medical records.
Templates that power everyday workflows.
By building their own templates, clinicians were able to reduce note-taking time and focus on providing care.
It was important for clinicians to be able to search for, and purchase the right type of shoe for their patients.
The bottom card showcases a modular design for key actions. I designed a flexible system with developers to use across the app, making essential functions easy to access and develop quickly. This approach enables fast feature rollout and a consistent experience.
It was important for clinicians to be able to search for, and purchase the right type of shoe for their patients.
While conducting research, I discovered that 30% of our patients were veterans. Understanding their urgent need for care, I advocated for and secured prioritized foot care services for all veterans, including expedited appointments and medical device deliveries.
AI overviews for quick responses.
Creating an easily accessible history of patient data and being able to retrieve it quickly and safely was important during any patient visit to provide the clinician with crucial medical context. This experiences is still being tested and in early stages.
Practicing Clinician
Practicing Clinician
By collaborating with patients and clinicians, we plan on bringing forth the next generation of experiences.
Enabling collaboration with clinicians, I helped our team build a prototype to measure users' foot pressure data to improve orthotics design and patient comfort.
The team is integrating foot pressure data with existing datasets to provide users a holistic foot health overview. I'm designing a clinical study with engineering and AI teams to analyse how these data points correlate and impact overall foot health outcomes
Today, our platform screens over 100+ patients daily for early-stage foot complexities. It helps doctors take Medicare-compliant notes and quickly check for signs of foot ulcers and calluses. Our AI models continue to be tested, and aim to assist doctors by lowering the cognitive load that comes with paperwork. The goal is to enable them to spend more time caring for patients, by saving them many hours each day. This kind of impact motivates me to keep improving our work. As a founding designer I am working on building a strong foundation for our company to create new ways to help save lives.
