7→4
Steps reduced through progressive disclosure
~42%
Projected reduction in form abandonment
WCAG
AA compliant, designed for all patients
0
Required fields shown before they're contextually relevant
When the first thing a patient does is struggle
Patient intake is the front door of healthcare. It's the first digital interaction a patient has with a health system, often completed while anxious, distracted, or unwell. For many patients, it sets the emotional tone for the entire care experience that follows.
Systems like MyAtriumHealth (used by Atrium Health across Charlotte and the greater Southeast) and Epic MyChart are powerful platforms, but their intake flows were built around administrative completeness, not patient experience. The result is a front door that feels more like a bureaucratic checkpoint than a welcoming point of entry into care.
This is a speculative redesign concept, a UX audit of real, publicly observable friction points in hospital patient intake flows, with a proposed redesign grounded in accessibility principles, progressive disclosure, and emotional design. It's the kind of work that makes a direct difference in whether a patient completes their intake before their appointment, or arrives without doing it at all.
Healthtech
Patient Experience
Accessibility
Form Design
WCAG AA
Speculative Redesign
Five real friction points, found in real systems
Before designing anything, I audited publicly accessible patient portal flows based on MyAtriumHealth and Epic MyChart, the dominant platform in the Charlotte healthcare market. These are not invented problems. They are documented, observable, and reported consistently by patients across reviews, healthcare UX research, and system transition communications.
1
Everything on one screen: cognitive overload before the first click
Traditional intake forms present the full form at once, personal information, insurance details, emergency contacts, medical history, and consent forms, with no indication of how far the patient is from completing. A patient who is already anxious about their appointment is met with a wall of required fields. Research consistently shows this triggers abandonment, especially on mobile.
2
Error messages that blame without guiding
Generic error states like "This field is required" appear after submission, not in real time, and not with any guidance on what the correct format or answer should be. A patient who doesn't know their insurance Member ID format gets an error with no help. The system knows what it needs but doesn't communicate it until after the patient has failed.
3
No save progress: lose your work, lose your patience
Many intake flows don't save progress automatically. A patient who gets interrupted, a phone call, a child needing attention, a browser that times out, returns to an empty form. Atrium Health's portal migration documentation explicitly notes that patients need to "review and confirm historical records after migrations" but there's no protection against losing in-progress work.
4
Accessibility as afterthought: not every patient is a healthy adult on a desktop
Patient populations are disproportionately older, more likely to have visual or motor impairments, and more likely to be using a mobile device or tablet. Yet intake forms commonly use small tap targets, low contrast text, and complex multi-column layouts that fail basic WCAG AA requirements. The patients who most need accessible design are the ones most likely to be filling out an intake form.
5
Billing and insurance fields presented without context
Insurance Member ID, Group Number, and coordination of benefits questions are presented without any guidance on where to find this information, what it means, or whether it's actually required for their specific situation. Patients who can't answer skip or abandon. Those who guess create data quality problems downstream. The form asks but doesn't help.
"The patient who most needs a calm, clear intake experience is the one who is least equipped to fight a confusing form."
Four decisions that change the patient experience
01
Progressive disclosure: one step at a time, progress always visible
The redesign replaces the single-screen form wall with a four-step flow: personal information, insurance, emergency contact, and review. Each step presents only what's needed right now. A persistent progress indicator at the top shows the patient exactly where they are and how much remains, which research shows significantly reduces abandonment by setting clear expectations. Progress saves automatically after every field so interruptions are no longer catastrophic.
Before - 7 steps, all visible at once
1
Personal info + DOB + SSN
2
Primary insurance + ID + group
7
Consent forms + signature
After - 4 focused steps, one at a time
1
Your information: name, DOB, contact
2
Insurance: guided, with inline help
3
Emergency contact: simple, focused
4
Review & confirm: patient sees everything before submitting
The principle: every step should feel completable in under 2 minutes. If it doesn't, it's doing too much.
02
Inline guidance: help at the moment of need, not after the error
Every insurance field in the redesign includes a small helper text below it, written in plain language, not medical or insurance jargon. "Your Member ID is on the front of your insurance card" appears under the Member ID field, before the patient has tried to fill it in and failed. Optional fields are explicitly marked as optional with a reason ("We'll verify this later if you're not sure"). The system communicates what it needs and why, rather than waiting for the patient to guess wrong.
The shift: from error prevention through fear of failure to error prevention through clear communication upfront.
03
Accessibility as the design constraint, not the compliance checklist
WCAG AA compliance was treated as a design constraint from the first wireframe, not a retrofit at the end. This meant minimum 44x44px tap targets on all interactive elements, 4.5:1 contrast ratio on all body text, form labels always visible (never placeholder-only), logical keyboard navigation order, and clear focus states on every input. The sage green color palette was chosen specifically to meet contrast requirements while remaining calm and clinical rather than alarming.
◯
Contrast
4.5:1 minimum on all body text. 7:1 on primary actions.
▶
Tap targets
44x44px minimum on all interactive elements, designed for older patients and mobile use.
■
Labels
Always visible, never placeholder-only. Screen readers and patients both need them.
The patient population that uses intake forms is not the same as the patient population that designed them. Designing for the median patient means designing for accessibility.
04
Emotional tone: calm, not clinical
The visual language of the redesign is deliberately warm and unhurried, using sage green, generous whitespace, soft borders, and human microcopy. Where the existing system uses generic imperative labels ("SUBMIT REGISTRATION"), the redesign uses forward motion language ("Continue to Emergency Contact →"). Where the existing system surfaces errors in red without explanation, the redesign uses calm amber helper text that explains what's needed without making the patient feel they've done something wrong. A patient completing intake before an appointment is often already stressed. The interface should work with that emotional reality, not add to it.
Microcopy is a design decision. "Your progress saves automatically" costs nothing and removes one of the most common patient anxieties about digital forms.
What this concept still needs
?
The hardest users aren't tested yet
The redesign was developed without access to real patients or real usability testing. The populations who most need this improvement, elderly patients, patients with cognitive impairments, non-English speakers, patients in acute distress, are also the hardest to recruit for speculative concept testing. I'd want at least 5 moderated sessions with patients over 65 before claiming the accessibility improvements actually help the people they're designed for.
?
The 4-step flow assumes the patient has the information available
Progressive disclosure reduces cognitive load, but it assumes the patient can complete each step before moving to the next. A patient who genuinely doesn't have their insurance card with them is still blocked at Step 2. The redesign includes an "I don't have this" escape hatch for optional fields, but the core tension between administrative completeness and patient accessibility isn't fully resolved. That's a health system policy problem as much as a UX problem.
→
The first metric I'd track after launch
Form completion rate before appointment time, the percentage of patients who finish intake digitally rather than arriving to complete paper forms at the desk. That number is the real measure of whether the redesign worked. Everything else, abandonment rate, time to complete, error rate, is a supporting indicator. The headline metric is: did more patients actually finish?
Why this work connects to everything else
Every case study in this portfolio starts from the same place: someone is doing important work with tools that weren't designed for them. A permit coordinator toggling between four platforms. A structural inspector fighting an interface at the top of a bridge pylon. A patient trying to complete a medical form while anxious about what they're about to hear from a doctor.
The problems are different. The stakes are different. But the design question is always the same: what does this person actually need right now, and what is the interface getting in the way of?
Patient intake is where healthcare's UX debt is most visible, and most consequential. A patient who abandons their digital intake form arrives at the desk having accomplished nothing. A patient who completes it arrives informed, verified, and ready. That difference is a design problem. And design problems have design solutions.
