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From Scattered to Structured: Designing Tendo's Case Coordination and Messaging System
My Role
Sole designer, end-to-end
The Team
1 PM, 2 engineers, 1 designer (hi — it's me!)
Timeline
5 months
Pilot launch (Q3 2026)
01
Project Overview
Problem, approach, outcome
02
Discovery
Research, competitive analysis
03
Process
AI workflow, key decisions
04
Final Design
Navigator + provider flows
Project Overview
About Care Connect

Care Connect is a healthcare marketplace that helps care navigators find and purchase procedures for their members.

Challenge

Care navigators — the coordinators who guide patients through complex medical procedures — had no direct way to communicate with providers inside the platform. Every coordination request left the app: a phone call, an email, a fax — with no shared record and no visibility into where things stood.

Solution

Design a case coordination system that brings navigator-provider communication into the platform, tied directly to patient and procedure context, with an architecture built to support AI participation from day one.

My role

I was the sole designer on this project, with end-to-end ownership across both the navigator-facing and provider-facing surfaces of the platform.

Process

I followed my typical product design process — discovery, ideation, prototyping & testing, and iterating — with AI experiments integrated throughout.

Discovery
Ideate
Prototype & Test
Iterate
Results

We're currently in development, with a pilot launching Q3 2026 across a select group of navigator and provider partners. Below are a few screens from the final design.

Discovery
User Interviews

I led 20 user interview sessions with navigators and providers — including an onsite visit to one of our navigator's office in Pennsylvania. Five navigator organizations and two provider partners participated. We wanted to better understand:

  • How were both sides (navigators and provider staff) currently managing coordination — and where were the biggest breakdowns?
  • What would it take for providers to actually adopt a new way of coordinating with navigators?
Competitive Analysis
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Competitor 1
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Competitor 2
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Competitor 3
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Research Synthesis

After affinity mapping, we learned there were 3 major issues with the current coordination process:

[ Affinity map screenshot ]

We learned there were 3 major issues with the current coordination process:

Pain Points
Our Goals
Coordination was slow and manual
Navigators and providers had no direct way to reach each other inside the platform, so every request meant a phone call, email, or fax
Centralize all navigator-provider coordination inside the platform, tied to the case it belongs to
Context got lost at every handoff
With coordination scattered across channels, navigators, providers, and Care Connect staff were each starting from scratch every time a new issue came up
Surface the full case history in one continuous timeline so everyone has the same view
Navigators had no single place to manage their members
With no patient profile aggregating active cases and outstanding items, navigators had to piece together status across multiple places just to get a basic picture of where a patient stood
Build a patient-centric view that surfaces all case activity in one place, so navigators can manage their members without hunting for context
AI Experiment
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