Tigerconnect
2019-2021
Snippets of the American movement towards Telehealth via Tigerconnect.
Overview
When COVID hit in early 2020, our patient messaging tool suddenly became critical Telehealth infrastructure. This is the story of how we rapidly adapted existing patient communication systems into life-saving video consultation tools during healthcare's greatest crisis, creating solutions that became TigerConnect's most-used features for two years straight.
Healthcare design context: Healthcare design operates under unique constraints: user data cannot be collected due to privacy regulations, efficiency often matters more than engagement (clinicians need to focus on patients, not interfaces), and research relies on direct observation rather than analytics.
My Role
Lead Designer
UX/UI designer
Brand Designer
Platforms
Desktop App
Desktop Web
Mobile Web
IOS App
Android App
Year
2019 - 2021
The Crisis Call (February 2020)
I was designing patient messaging tools at TigerConnect when COVID hit. Suddenly, hospitals were calling us desperately. Could we add video to our patient messaging system? They needed telehealth capabilities for remote consultations.
They needed it fast. Not startup fast, but "we're running out of safe ways to treat people" fast.
We had about a month to figure out how to turn a patient messaging tool into something that could handle real medical consultations where every design decision could save lives.
The Patient Network Foundation (2019)
We'd been building patient communication infrastructure throughout 2019, though we had no idea it would become critical pandemic infrastructure a year later.
Before the 2020 COVID emergency, we had already created a large collaboration suite of healthcare tools that kept healthcare clinics running in the US, Canada, and all of Singapore. Building to that position took us about 4 years of redesigning, testing, failing, and reinventing what TigerConnect could do.
By 2019, we had identified a clear need to help bridge the gap for clinicians to communicate outside their organizations to those they spent so long collaborating to serve—patients.
The Foundation: Message Anyone (MA)
We actually had a basic solution already: a simple mobile web messenger we called MA (Message Anyone). It was an old freemium user acquisition hack that allowed clinicians to create temporary conversations with anyone using their email. It worked for small clinics but had a lot of room for improvement and scaling—especially for large enterprise organizations.
Texting patients directly wasn't even considered possible when we first started targeting healthcare in 2015. Hospitals were still using pagers. We had spent 4 years making hospitals comfortable with the idea that clinicians could text each other without having to page someone to meet at the central desk or call back.
The Patient Context: A.K.A "The Sandwich"
While working on patient-centered features, we needed to create a visual symbol that meant "patient information over here." We designed a patient context bubble that took all the core patient identifiers needed to look up a patient via EHR and verify their identity in one compact bubble.
The clinicians instantly nicknamed it "the patient sandwich"—it looked cramped, like information stuffed between bread slices. The sandwich became instant TC internal terminology.
When we rolled out patient context conversations, we got two clear questions from clinicians: "Is the patient inside this conversation?" When we said no, this is just the reference, they'd follow up with: "Can we message that patient from there?"
This was a real "we did it" moment for many of the old-timers at TC. Hospitals had always needed more ways to communicate with patients, but the mountain of liabilities and infrastructure limitations made it a dream for most—maybe possible for small clinics, but never for large enterprise organizations.
The Patient Network (2019)
We jumped at the opportunity to finally offer a refined solution. We took the MA concept and the patient sandwich and figured out how to build a full network from those original experiments.
Contradicting Needs
Designing for healthcare can sometimes ask you to create, as my design mentor once put it, hot ice cream. We needed to figure out how to connect clinicians with patients while preventing accidental data leaks from hospital operations. We had to do that while making it clear to clinicians that a patient context conversation DID NOT include a patient, while giving them a way to contact the patient in the same app.
Thankfully, our previous messenger redesign had accounted for problems like this by giving us an expandable framework to build from.
Front of house and back of hospital separation
We created a mirror messenger with the branding and color palette of the patient context—making it immediately clear this was a different messenger than the internal hospital one. This ensured no patient names mixed with internal clinician conversations and that inside hospital discussions wouldn't accidentally spill into the patient side.
The system populated a new messenger with EHR information, where clinicians could only start conversations with patients. They could create groups and pass patients between clinicians, but the patient context stayed clear.
The Use Case: Prep Before and Follow-up After Appointments
The Patient Network's initial focus was messaging before and after appointments—covering the communication gaps that traditional appointments couldn't handle, but also providing a lighter way to keep contact with patients.
Most large clinics at the time would keep contact with patients via 15-30 minute scheduled appointments, but most times they just needed a quick check-up. There wasn't a way to do that without an encrypted, private, and HIPAA-compliant tool.
This scheduling and calling system left an opportunity for optimization of clinician time. We hoped that offering clinicians a texting-based solution to reach out to patients, via the same apps they already had, could help reduce the time they spent per outreach.
Building Our Future Foundation
We launched the Patient Messenger around fall 2019 thinking it would help alleviate some basic patient logistics.
We built it around the patient sandwich visual language that clinicians already understood to mean "patient information lives here." Using the same colors and structure they were familiar with, but making it clear this was a different messenger meant for patients.
So When Hospitals Called... (Back to 2020)
We had the messaging infrastructure, but turning the Patient Network into full telehealth meant solving entirely new design problems under extreme time pressure.
Building on What We Had
Instead of building telehealth from scratch, we extended what already worked. The SMS/email patient access? Perfect for emergencies—scared patients could click a link, not download an app. The visual separation system? Ready to handle video calls without compromising security.
But video consultations needed something our messaging tool didn't have: multiple clinicians coordinating in real-time.
Enabling Hallway Conversations Digitally
Healthcare workers already knew how to hand off patients—they'd been doing it for decades in hospital corridors. Instead of building complex triaging systems, we digitized what worked: message a colleague about the case, see if they're available, invite them to the video call.
The clinician would receive the call via their TigerConnect app, or if they were already on the web app, they'd get a floating call interface they could accept or ignore. This design choice was crucial—we used a familiar phone call pattern that required minimal cognitive load during stressful situations. The floating interface meant clinicians could continue their current work while deciding whether to join the consultation.
This allowed clinicians to do handoffs via video call, with or without the patient, then add the patient into the new video call.
The patient always saw one simple interface, but doctors could coordinate behind the scenes exactly like they did in person. This maintained the "front of house vs back of hospital" separation we'd established with the patient sandwich design, but now applied to live video consultations.
Designing Under Crisis
Working under crisis conditions meant making design decisions without traditional user testing cycles. We couldn't visit hospitals, and clinicians were too overwhelmed to spend time on feedback sessions. We had to launch as quickly as possible with our first iteration and iterate based on real usage during medical consultations.
This provided more accurate feedback than any controlled testing environment could have offered—healthcare workers using the system during actual patient care gave us insights no lab study could match.
The MVP Launch
When we launched our telehealth solution, the adoption was instant. You could feel the palpable relief from users as the rollout happened. TigerConnect clinics immediately implemented video screening measures during their busiest crisis period.
Long-Term Impact
Immediate Crisis Response: Hospitals implemented video screening during their most critical period. The handoff approach worked so well that when we later tried building automated triage features, clinicians still preferred the human coordination model.
Sustained Impact: The patient messaging foundation proved robust enough to support additional features like family member access and guardian management. What started as crisis response became standard healthcare infrastructure.
Design Validation: Our decision to enable existing hallway coordination patterns rather than build automated systems proved correct. When we later built automated features, clinicians still preferred the human handoff model we'd digitized.
For more on this project download the app
