The Smart Healthcare

Birdie.Care is a healthcare SaaS platform designed (web app and native mobile app) for home care agencies and care managers. It helps manage and optimize the delivery of home care services by streamlining tasks such as care planning, scheduling, and patient care monitoring. The product focuses on improving efficiency, communication, and care quality, making it easier for care teams to deliver personalized and coordinated care to patients in their homes.

The Problem - High Churn

Reports regarding Churn by Product Area indicated that 67% of our largest client group (SMEs) churned early. Feedback revealed that "Scheduling far outweighs the other parts of the rostering product" and is the biggest contributor to churn. Customers who left often cited rostering issues, suggesting that the core functions—scheduling shifts, managing staff availability, and automating rostering—aren’t meeting user needs.

Our Goal

Our goal with Planning v2 is to reduce the time care teams spend on logistical planning and minimize the number of unassigned activities. By doing so, we aim to improve care quality, enhance task assignment accuracy, and deliver a more intuitive and scalable experience. This effort directly addresses a major churn driver among our SME clients—scheduling issues, contributing to higher product adoption and ROI.

The Team

I led design end-to-end—from research and wireframes to prototyping, testing, and working closely with engineers. We moved fast to meet tight deadlines, kept stakeholders aligned, and operated in a high-ownership setup alongside a PM, product owner, and engineer.

Understanding User Needs

A Care Manager coordinates and oversees care for clients. They assess needs, plan tasks and medications, manage schedules, ensure compliance, and monitor care delivery. Their goal is to provide high-quality, personalized care while supporting carers, reducing risks, and maintaining communication with families.

A Care Coordinator is responsible for ensuring all client visits are covered while balancing carer availability, skills, and preferences. Their role involves scheduling, managing last-minute changes, and maintaining compliance with regulatory standards.

Competitors

Based on competitor research, we've learned that Birdie excels in linking tasks and medications when schedules are edited, automating ad hoc visit assignments, and integrating care plans with real-time updates. It also ensures task compliance and improves operational efficiency. However, competitors highlight areas for improvement, including automating one-off visits, refining bulk editing, tracking care plan evolution, and enhancing compliance and outcome tracking.

Current Experience

The experience with rostering is inconsistent and not fully integrated. Key pain points include:

• Orphaned tasks: Users often miss the manual drag-and-drop step needed to link tasks and meds to visits, leaving activities unscheduled.

• Time-consuming workflows: Manually dragging activities into visits is slow, especially for clients with many tasks.

• Lack of flexibility: Users can’t easily move visits, reorder tasks, or edit details like medication dosage without deleting and recreating.

• Limited visibility: Users can’t always see why a medication wasn't administered, which impacts oversight and safety.

Concept & Validation

Initial Concept

We initially designed Programs to group related tasks, medications, and care activities into structured plans. The goal was to reduce manual work by allowing care managers to create pre-set routines, like medication schedules or post-hospital recovery plans, rather than assigning each task individually. Programs were meant to ensure consistency and simplify care planning with reusable workflows.

Testing Showed Friction!

During testing, we found that Programs added friction—users saw assigning tasks to them as an extra, unnecessary step. Redesigning them would have required a major UX overhaul, which wasn't feasible during our migration. Programs also didn’t align well with visit schedules, adding complexity. Users felt the nesting made planning feel like “containers within containers.” Inspired by simpler setups used by competitors, we chose a more flexible approach, focusing on alerts for unassigned tasks rather than rigid structures.

New Concept Came Out of This:

We replaced Programs with a new concept of Sessions to simplify planning and add flexibility. With a visit-first approach, care managers can create a visit plan once (e.g., Monday morning) and reuse it across other days without setting up a Program. Alternatively, using an activity-first approach, they can begin with a needs assessment and assign tasks directly to visits, similar to how V1 worked, but with more clarity.

Shift of Focus

Why We Chose Sessions Instead

To address Program limitations, we introduced Sessions—a more flexible way to plan care independently of visit schedules, while still allowing links when needed. This separation from rostering improves flexibility, simplifies maintenance, and avoids reworking key features like the MAR chart, offering a scalable solution without disrupting workflows.

What Is a Session?

A Session is a block of time during which care activities (tasks and medications) are delivered. It groups activities based on care needs rather than visit times and can span multiple visits if needed.

Instead of assigning tasks and medications one by one (previous slow drag-and-drop system), care managers assign grouped activities (the Activity List) to visits through Sessions while still linking to visits when needed. This reduces friction, improves clarity, and eliminates orphaned tasks.

Why Not Assign Directly to Visits?

Activities often have their recurrence (e.g., every three days), which rarely aligns perfectly with visit schedules. Assigning directly to visits forces a rigid structure and risks missed care. Sessions solve this by allowing each to follow its natural cadence while surfacing issues like missing visits or tasks.

Why Sessions Work

• Efficient: They reduce time spent planning and eliminate drag-and-drop.

• Reliable: Activities are always accounted for and linked properly.

• Integrated: They align well with new rostering and scale with teams.

• Future-Ready: They support complex care and new market needs without rebuilding key systems.

Testing showed gaps, so we quickly re-evaluated and shipped a new concept.

We implemented the new sessions system and quickly brought designs into the front-end, enabling clients to test directly in their agency hub. This early testing provided valuable feedback, which proved the new direction was much clearer and users appreciated the reduced friction of removing the drag and drop system and automation of activities and visits assignment. At the same time, it revealed new key issues. We also ran a company-wide dogfooding round, gaining insights from different roles to identify what felt intuitive, what didn’t work, and where bugs existed.

New problems with the System: In V2 rostering, visits are created in one-, two-, or multi-week templates (e.g., 3 weeks), generating separate, repeating visits (e.g., 11 in total). While bulk selection allows setting identical start times, these visits are no longer connected once created. Each links to the same activity list within a session, resulting in multiple identical activity lists (e.g., 11 Morning lists), and edits affect only the individual visit. Each activity list was treated separately, meaning changes or reordering cannot be done in bulk across days. The system of weekly activities allowed activities to fit within any visit structure, but unintentionally created fragmented, individual day schedules.

Important Insights & Workshops

Cadence activities appear daily, which is extremely confusing.

The activity template UI looks too similar to the calendar.

Alerts about activity lists being linked to multiple schedules are misleading.

Following this, I ran a workshop with software engineers to re-evaluate the concept and explore ways to improve the system’s UX, fix bugs, and ensure changes wouldn’t disrupt client data migration. I also led several cross-functional workshops to assess the information architecture—evaluating the ideal placement of features across or within pages, or in sidebars—to simplify the interface.

Finally, I analyzed edge-case scenarios using Snowflake data to understand their frequency and make evidence-based design decisions. This all led to a rapid pivot toward a clearer, simpler Day Template concept.

Final Solution

Based on these insights, I decided, together with engineers and key stakeholders, to pivot to a simplified Day Template concept and test it as our new direction. The Day Template is designed to make scheduling tasks and medications clearer by focusing on a single day, grouped by session (e.g., morning, afternoon), rather than using weekly templates that caused confusion and misaligned cadences.

In this new system, each visit template links to one activity list—for example, all morning visits across a 3-week schedule are now tied to a single "Morning Activities" list, instead of separate lists for each day. Tasks with varying cadences (e.g., every 2 days or weekly) are supported, and the system flags any gaps where a task doesn’t align with a visit. If multiple visits are needed within one session, users can simply create an additional visit schedule and link it to a new activity list (e.g., "Morning Activities 2"). This approach keeps activity lists clean, manageable, and aligned with visit schedules, removing complexity while enhancing flexibility and clarity for users.

Extra Initiation

As part of the redesign, I also proposed a significant improvement to the notification system for managers. Previously, alerts about missing visits or unassigned tasks were buried inside individual client profiles, where they were often ignored—something we confirmed through direct feedback and Looker data. After running research sessions, early testing, and a cross-team workshop, I recommended surfacing these alerts at the Clients tab level. This gave managers a central view of all clients, allowed them to filter by severity, and navigate directly to client calendars to take action, making oversight faster and easier.

Results & Learnings

Results:

The impact of these changes was substantial. We saw a 50% reduction in time spent creating and updating care plans, measured through internal user observation and self-reported time tracking. More notably, unassigned activities dropped by 98%, verified through backend event logs. The updated system was quickly adopted, with 12 large agencies signing on within the first month of launch, marking it as a strong commercial success.

Learnings:

This project reinforced the importance of continuous testing, cross-functional collaboration, and knowing when to pivot. Every iteration taught us something new—what seemed intuitive on paper often failed in practice, and quick feedback loops were essential in finding better solutions. It also highlighted the value of earning stakeholder trust: explaining clearly why certain solutions didn’t work and guiding them through better alternatives helped us move faster and more confidently. Lastly, we learned to stay open and adaptable—the right solution isn’t always the first idea, and being willing to challenge our assumptions led to real product impact.