Upside Health builds tools for chronic pain treatment and management. Their app, Branch, was meant for two purposes: to help patients track their condition and bridge the communication gap between patients and clinicians.
Chronic pain is managed in the gaps. Appointments sit months apart, and pain is measured abstractly, making treatment plans difficult to personalize effectively.
Increase in user satisfaction
+60%
Satisfaction
Increased in user retention
+20%
Retention
reporting better pain control within a month
83%
empowerment
Patients enroll through doctor perscription
87%
Enrollment
the real problem
Onboarding was a symptom of a bigger problem
The project was planned to start by fixing onboarding. Drop-off was real, and it was severe. However, after auditing the app, the real problem wasn't just onboarding alone.
Branch gave patients very little reason to come back, so they stopped opening it. With almost nothing being captured, nothing meaningful ever reached their doctors. Doctors had nothing to look at and no reason to use Upside Health. And with their doctors not involved, patients got even less out of being there.
It's a dead cycle. Onboarding was one symptom of it. Patching a single point wouldn't have helped.
1.0 | User Stories
The gap
Patients and doctors were describing the same pain in two different languages
There is a validated clinical instrument for measuring pain, and it is written for clinicians. The company tried to close that gap with a person. A nurse would call, ask the questions, and pass notes back to the doctor. The redesign had to move that translation into the product.
A patient can tell you:
+ How the week went
+ What they took
+ What they had to give up
+ Whether they slept
+ Whether it felt worse than last time
A clinician needs to hear:
+ A standardized score
+ Comparable to the last one
+ Tied to medication and activity
+ Mood
+ Sleep
The solutions
Everything started with one behavior, then built outward
The app was built to get one thing done
Everything in Branch fed a single behavior: finishing the weekly check-in. That is where the patient's own record came from, the most important data to run the cycle.
The full picture once, then in pieces.
The full questionnaire contains 8 sections with 5 questions per section. It takes more than five minutes. It becomes boring and lengthy if it asks the same things week after week. So I broke it into 2 versions:
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A full version at signup, and it's used as the baseline data.
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After that, weekly check-ins include only two sections at a time on a four-week cycle. Short enough to finish in a bad week and never the same two weeks in a row.
The habit is what makes episode logging possible.
Logging a flare-up while it happens sounds logical, but it was unrealistic. It asks for extra effort when there is none to give. The weekly check-in builds the habit of entering data and lets the user see the value of answering the questions. Once that routine exists, logging an episode becomes realistic.
02.
The clinician portal that bridges the communication gap
What Branch had in mind was just too narrow, providing very little value to the doctors. I argued it needed more, even for an MVP.
An overall view of practice
See who is prescribed with Branch, who is using it, an overall progress of patients using Branch, and any patient needs immediate attention.
With a baseline on file, the system can catch a change. The portal surfaces the patient who needs attention instead of waiting to be searched.
This is what the weekly check-in was for
Let doctors track progress, capture notes, and access patients’ check-in data captured in the app. With standardized pain scoring and shared progress data, the doctor could diagnose more easily, see more holistically, and create personalized treatment plans.
Content that runs both ways
A doctor can send an article or a session, and prescribe action plans to the patients. This content is marked as coming from their doctor, and the doctor can see in the portal whether it was opened.
03.
A brand new version of the community
What existed was just a feed. Everyone agreed it needed work. A facelift was the expensive option, and it provided no value to the app and might actually hurt it.
More meaningful connections
The new version gave users something to do together. Shared and time-boxed goals with accountability made the connections more meaningful. Doing something together strengthens the bond.
Closing
The structure is built for expansion
Restarting a dead cycle usually comes down to fixing one thing. For Branch, that was the weekly check-in. Almost every decision came back to it: what the dashboard led with, what the portal surfaced first, what got held back from launch.
In this project, we didn’t just redesign the product. We rebuilt the whole structure for expansion, targeting other chronic illnesses. While I was there, we built an app with just the shared goals feature for an arthritis foundation. The foundation used it to support one of their campaigns. It was very successful and received positive feedback.
