overview

Dialogue’s Care Coordinators (CTMs) manually triaged medical faxes and associated them with patient records. Limited search capabilities led to slow decisions and high risk of PHI breaches. I led research and design improvements that reduced triage time and restored confidence in a mission-critical workflow.

CTMs could only search by name, email, or date of birth. When results surfaced multiple patients, they had to open profiles in new tabs and compare information to avoid mistakes. This could take anywhere from 2 to 3 minutes per fax (8 min. max) and introduced constant stress around selecting the wrong record — which could result in a privacy breach.

Instead of waiting for a full backend restructure, I collaborated closely with engineering to design a prefix-based search pattern that allowed CTMs to control what type of identifier they were searching. Inspired by familiar tools like Slack and Jira, this lightweight approach required minimal retraining and drastically reduced uncertainty.

Users could:

• Continue typing alphanumeric fields naturally (like a patient’s name)

• Add prefixes like phone: or id: to narrow numeric searches

• See highlighted matches in results for faster confidence

• Stack multiple search criteria to filter more precisely

I designed the interaction, built interactive prototypes, and ran usability testing to confirm clarity, efficiency, and adoption readiness.