League · Internship
A clearer next step for patients and the people caring for them
Role
Product Design Intern · Client Solutions
Team
2 Designers, 5 Engineers, 1 Product Manager, 1 Project Manager
Tools
Figma, Claude
Duration
8 weeks
The challenge
Care shouldn’t start at the emergency department.
During my internship at League, I helped design a digital front door for a hospital system in Ontario. The focus was patients with palliative care or ambulatory care sensitive conditions, where better support outside the hospital could help reduce avoidable emergency visits.
There are multiple stakeholders involved in the experience:
Patients
Unsure where to go or what to do next.
Caregivers
Coordinating care with limited support.
Providers
Working across disconnected systems.
A shared direction
Help people take action before care becomes urgent.
The PILOT goal
1,000 target patients complete at least one care action enabled by our solution to prevent an emergency visit or admission.
Solution
Four ways to take the next step in care.
Share health status with your care team
Log symptoms and respond to prompts for follow-up care.
Seek guidance when unsure what to do next
Ask for support when the next step feels unclear.
Find care in the community
Explore relevant support beyond the emergency department.
Act on shared care information
Help a loved one keep up with their care.
Research
Listening to the community experiences with Canadian healthcare
Throughout our discovery process, we talked with actual users through two research streams:
Community Panel
Hearing from lived experiences of 20 patients & caregivers.
Care Path Sessions
Short concept tests with individuals for personal feedback.
What could we learn from research on a different population?
I reviewed 10 League research reports and identified transferable interaction principles, but a major gap remains.
Existing evidence
US insurance members with heavier reliance on private healthcare.
This engagement
Canadian patients with different literacy, digital access, and social determinants.
One principle carried across.
Although insurance coverage did not translate directly to public healthcare, the underlying principle did: the solution needs to reduce uncertainty about how to access support.
Exploration
I explored ways to reduce uncertainty about care, though not every idea passed technical review.
Coverage labels on community resources
TRADE-off
The data was not retrievable, as this was dependent on the patient’s specific plan.
A claim on AI output's clinical review
TRADE-off
No such human review process existed, which made the claim both inaccurate and a legal vulnerability.
A language selector
TRADE-off
A manual in-app toggle was not supported out of the box and carried high cost for the pilot release.
A notification centre
TRADE-off
Not supported out of the box, and overlaps with the time-sensitive items already on the home page.
Testing for user feedback
We brought our prototypes to the community panel to hear their thoughts.
AI assistance should be reliable.
Patients and caregivers need accurate medical support, with clear safeguards when needed.
Support for a "one care team" approach.
Caregivers wanted guidance that felt connected to and informed by their care team.
Design decisions
Two product areas carried the transferable findings.
The explorations above changed after technical review and user testing. I kept the underlying need in focus while adapting the design to what we could realistically support.
AI assistance should be reliable and transparent.
A verified trust signal on the entry point.
AI does not replace medical advice.
Support for a "one care team" approach.
Status and action log per care recipient.
Caregiver-specific support resources.
Impact
Community members expressed strong trust and optimism in the product's impact.
Though the solution has not been released to the public, community panel members have recognized how helpful it would be as a companion for them and their loved ones.
This will help a great deal in storing info about my mother's health that I usually just keep in my head.
M.A., caregiver for palliative patient
I hope that I will rely less on my care team when this platform is launched.
P.S., diabetes patient
What I learned
Design became a strategy conversation.
I learned to bring user needs, platform constraints, and research into the same conversation. The most useful design was not always the most ambitious one, but the one the team could carry forward with a clear reason behind it.
