Background

Clearing was a healthcare platform dedicated to providing comprehensive, opioid-free care for over 50 million chronic pain sufferers in America. Our mission was to offer alternative care solutions for patients who prefer not to rely on opioids for managing their symptoms.

When I joined the company in 2021, our business model focused on a product-forward D2C approach. Patients would fill out a medical intake form and receive a custom compound cream, personalized exercises, and optional product add-ons to manage their pain. While this method was effective for some, it had several fundamental issues and limitations, as it only partially managed patients’ pain. Additionally, we discovered that our patient base was frustrated with the traditional medical system and desired a different approach to their care.

"Treatments are table-stakes — patients are looking for a partner & quarterback for care."

Research

To gain a deeper understanding of our patient base, we conducted a month-long ethnographic study involving 12 chronic pain patients from diverse ages, backgrounds, conditions, and pain durations. Patients were asked to keep a pain diary for one week and participate in exercises such as sharing their pain stories and illustrating their pain experiences.

We then held multiple hour-long sessions where patients described their daily lives and collaborated with us to design their ideal pain management system. This research allowed us to define patient profiles in the market and identify how we could better integrate into their lives.

Through this process, we learned that pain patients are looking for a true support network — often times when patients have been in pain for many years, they are less interested in treatments and are instead looking for a team of experts that listens. We held a full-day in-person off-site to synthesize our findings, empathize with our patients, and determine the next steps in the product delivery and re-design process.

“I want something that will help me overcome my haphazard schedule, increase my self-awareness about my pain, and my responsibility for making it better.” - Pain patient, 58

Design Process

We knew we had the tools to create a service that truly serves pain patients, but we needed to transform and reposition our business model from being product- and treatment-focused to being care-focused.We drew inspiration from within and outside the healthcare industry and established key guiding principles to shape our patient onboarding experience. Our research led us to design our onboarding process to be:

Conversational: Instead of bombarding patients with endless questions—what we affectionately called our ‘pain DMV’—we aimed for a back-and-forth conversation.

Empathetic: Recognizing that patients share deep and often traumatic parts of themselves, we aimed to be empathetic throughout the process, avoiding condescension or presumptions.

Educational: We provided resources and information about pain management as patients shared their experiences, ensuring they gained value from the experience even if they didn’t convert.

Personalized: Our original onboarding process was static, with only the treatment being personalized. We aimed to tailor the onboarding process to respond to individual patient inputs and needs.

Guided by these principles, we embarked on a rapid design and prototyping process. We developed over 15 different versions of our onboarding and conducted 20 user tests with 170 participants over a month. We watched over 28 hours of user testing videos and analyzed various approaches to create a care-forward experience.

An interesting aspect of our process was primarily testing the experience with static Figma prototypes. Once we established the overarching design approach for onboarding, our engineering team built a coded prototype to test the onboarding experience with real patient inputs. This revealed that the experience wasn’t personalized enough to patients’ responses and that our messaging didn’t resonate with our audience.

To address this, we developed a branched approach based on patients’ pain relief goals at the start of onboarding. Depending on what patients told us about their needs, they could experience treatment-focused, medical-focused, relief coach-focused, or more generalized messaging.

Solution

We launched our new onboarding experience in January 2022, transitioning our business model from product-focused to care-focused.The new onboarding process was personalized, conversational, empathetic, and provided educational resources about pain throughout. As part of this transformation, we also rebranded the company, introducing a new style guide created during our design process.

Additionally, we implemented an innovative model and logic for personalizing the experience based on patient responses.

Results

Through this launch, we knew that we weren’t going to immediately nail a home run that helped us reach all of our target metrics as a business. Instead, we saw this launch as the foundation to build a new innovative approach to pain care, and to continue improving our service.

After launching, we immediately started measuring results, drop-off & pain points and began designing & launching a series of A/B tests that have allowed our business to grow to what it is today.