The challenge

Curve Health runs telemedicine for skilled nursing facilities: remote physicians treat frail residents with chronic conditions so they are not sent to the emergency room unnecessarily. The company closed its $12M Series A the month this work began, and was relaunching its MVP on technology inherited from the founder’s previous company. Physicians found the provider portal’s task-centric inbox overwhelming, and the bedside app asked nurses to do too much manual entry and scheduling. There was no brief: the first job was to work out where design would matter most.

My contribution

I was design director and led an embedded design and product team inside Curve, with a senior designer working full time in the company’s product organization. It was IDEO’s first embedded “externship” of this kind. I set the plan, ran weekly design reviews, and worked as the bridge between Curve’s founder and its CTO.

• Recruited physicians and bedside nurses for research through IDEO’s health network, and ran two weeks of interviews across Curve’s operations, clinical, and product teams to decide what to work on.
• Found what physicians juggling three or four patients needed: SOAP-format notes, the video visit pinned above documentation with patient history alongside, and fewer, smarter reminders.
• Explored three UI directions for the provider portal (a layered, chat-style interface; a waiting-room view built around joining video visits; and a tile-based view for documentation and to-dos), tested them with providers, and moved the portal from a task-centric inbox to a patient-centric workspace.
• Co-designed the bedside app with Curve’s product manager around chat-first coordination: nurses start with a message, see when a physician is available, reach vitals, files, and orders in one tap, and escalate to a call only when the situation needs it. The direction was built to ship in stages, starting with scheduling.
• Helped define and interview candidates for Curve’s first permanent UX lead, and left a full handoff of design files, walkthrough videos, and a next-steps plan.

The impact

Curve gained a patient-centric direction for its physician portal and a chat-first bedside app matched to the speed of work in a nursing facility, plus a permanent UX lead to carry the work forward. The company went on to raise $21.9M in total and expanded into services including telepsychiatry. Across its broader platform, Curve reports reducing transfers from skilled nursing facilities to emergency departments by more than 80%.