Hazel Health / 2022–2024
Hazel Health: Rebuilding Parent Communication & Care Coordination
Hazel needed a reliable way to communicate with families from consent through appointment coordination and follow-up. The existing experience was fragmented across email, paper, SMS, and school staff relays, creating uncertainty and delays for parents and clinicians.
Executive Summary
I directed UX strategy and workflow design, established the research practice, and aligned teams around a scalable foundation for enrollment, communication, and care coordination.
Operating Context
Parents lacked clarity about their child's care progress. Clinicians struggled with missing or delayed information. School teams often served as manual relays, juggling email, paper, SMS, and phone calls to keep everyone aligned.
Every solution also had to meet clinical compliance and safety requirements while treating parent consent as both a legal and emotional gate to care.
Impact & Outcomes
The UX foundation supported a complex healthcare product ecosystem serving students, families, school staff, clinicians, and operations teams.
Parent enrollment increased from 32% to 61% through improved digital tools and a fully online enrollment process.
The work reduced reliance on disconnected channels and improved clarity across parent communication, scheduling, and care coordination.
Led and produced care-delivery maps across telehealth and school-based operations, improving clinician preparedness, continuity of care, and assignment of students to therapists.
Decisions That Shaped The Work
- Established clear communication channels across parents, clinicians, school staff, and internal care teams.
- Validated qualitative parent and stakeholder insights against behavioral data before committing.
- Established a communication framework for notifications, follow-ups, consent flows, urgent information, and active appointments.
- Aligned product, engineering, clinical, and leadership around a unified, scalable communication model.
Shaping the experience
Outcomes
What Changed
- Parent enrollment increased from 32% to 61%Following improvements to digital enrollment and communication.
- Enrollment moved fully onlineReducing families' reliance on manual coordination.
- Reduced reliance on fragmented communication channelsParent, school, clinician, and internal operations touchpoints became easier to coordinate.
- Improved clinician preparednessTimelier information and clearer communication supported continuity of care.
- Improved therapist-assignment workflowsCare coordination created a clearer path for moving students toward the appropriate provider.
- Reduced manual scheduling dependencyDigital communication absorbed more of the coordination previously handled manually.
- Established a durable UX and research practiceGiving Hazel a repeatable way to ground product decisions in research, workflow analysis, and evidence beyond this individual initiative.
Principles I Carry Forward
What I Learned
- Transparency builds confidence.When people understand what is happening, what is expected of them, and what comes next, they are more willing to engage even in sensitive situations.
- Even small points of ambiguity create larger downstream problems.Unclear status, ownership, or next steps compound quickly. I now look for those gaps early, before they turn into broader experience or operational friction.
- Consistency matters more than volume.Predictable communication and interaction patterns create confidence more effectively than adding more messages, features, or touch points.
- Products should absorb complexity rather than pass it to the user.Internal handoffs, dependencies, and operational constraints should be handled by the system wherever possible instead of becoming work the user has to understand.
- Validate assumptions early when the stakes are emotional or consequential.In sensitive systems, intuition is not enough. I prefer to test the underlying direction with real users and stakeholders before scaling the solution.
