Eunsung Song

HealthTap · New product design

Non-visit encounter note

  • Shipped
  • 1-month design, 2-month engineering (05.2026 – 08.2026)
  • Lead product designer
  • 1 PM, 3 front-end engineers, 1 back-end engineer
  • Web and iOS
Non-visit encounter note on desktop and mobile
Background
HealthTap doctors deliver online primary care and virtual urgent care. Between scheduled video visits they were still renewing prescriptions, reviewing labs and answering messages.
Problem
No clean way to document care given between visits, and no clear picture of what happened before, during and after a video visit.
Approach
Defined the MVP with the clinical team, explored designs with AI, built a shared design system for web and iOS, and refined it through usability testing with doctors.
Outcome
More care recorded, far faster renewals, and a marked rise in how doctors rated the product.
50/50Non-visit notes / Visit notes
90%Faster prescription renewal

Problem

Inaccurate patient care history

Between video visits, HealthTap doctors were renewing prescriptions, adjusting medications, following up on labs, and answering messages. None of it had a home — the only format was a SOAP note built for a visit.

Inaccurate care history

Hard to tell what happened before, during, and after an online video visit.

Visit and non-visit care blur

Care delivered outside a visit was indistinguishable from care delivered in one.

Poor audit trail

No reliable record of who did what, when — a real problem in a regulated setting.

The visit note with an Add addendum note dialog open, asking for a reason and free-text note — the only way to record care delivered after a visit

Research

Non-visit encounter use cases & MVP scope

I worked with Clinical Operations to document and prioritise every non-visit encounter type, with AI-assisted research verified by clinicians. Sorting by frequency gave a defensible MVP: prescription renewal, message follow-up, and clinical updates.

A spreadsheet of non-visit encounter use cases with workflow, billability, frequency and product priority columns, sorted into V1 and V2 scope

Design exploration

Design exploration & iteration via AI

The AI shortened the path to a first draft. Clinical Operations still decided what was right.

Figma Make generating the first-pass non-visit encounter note: patient chart sidebar beside a full note form
The refined non-visit encounter note: problem list beside patient and doctor details, clinical notes, and an assessment and plan section for diagnosis codes, prescriptions, lab tests and supplies

Design system

Design system for the Patient chart and non-visit note

A patient chart holds an enormous amount of information, and it had to work on both desktop and phone, so I set the information architecture and a list component with defined variants, as rules to build against.

Information architecture for web and iOS

Define one consistent structure for Patient chart details, then reuse it in the non-visit encounter note on both desktop and mobile.

Web information architecture: the patient chart component broken into menu items, section and sub-section title bars and sub-section details, mapped beside the non-visit note component
iOS information architecture: the same structure across three screens, with the patient chart component on the left and note details on the right under Chart and Note tabs

List view vs. card view

We explored and tested list and card views for dense information. List view was used in the Patient chart. Card view was used in the note section that patients can also see.

The Assessment and plan section shown as a flat list of prescription, lab and supply orders beside a card view that expands one order into labelled detail fields
The list view applied across four iOS screens — problem list, encounters, prescriptions and health files — each row carrying an icon, title, diagnosis code and timestamp

Newly defined list component

One list component, specified across every text-line count and variant, then applied to each area of the chart.

The list component specification: five text-line counts down the rows against status, CTA and arrow variants across the columns, each combination annotated

Interaction design

Renewals reuse the previous prescription

Prescription renewal was the most frequent non-visit encounter, and the most tedious: eleven fields re-entered from the previous prescription. The new flow pulls the prior prescription forward intact. The doctor adjusts only what changed.

Usability testing

Five HealthTap doctors, four questions

Testing covered entry point discoverability, workflow, ease of use, and the assumptions behind the design. Three things held up. Two changed the design.

Five recorded HealthTap doctor feedback sessions with written summaries, behind a live remote session walking a doctor through the non-visit encounter note

What worked well

Care history became legible

In-between care no longer got buried in the chart, so doctors could follow the thread of a patient's care.

The entry point was found

Doctors discovered how to create a non-visit encounter note without prompting.

Renewal saved real time

Prescription renewal was called out as a significant time saver.

Minor updates: Filter by visit vs. non-visit notes

Let doctors filter visit vs. non-visit notes so non-visit entries don't clutter the encounters list.

The Encounters list with an open filter menu offering All notes, My notes, Other doctors’ notes, Visit notes and Non-visit notes

More minor updates

  • For clinical notes, the 100-character minimum caused the most consistent friction, so we reduced the requirement to allow doctors to enter as little as one character.
  • ICD-10 codes are pre-populated, allowing doctors to adjust them in just a few clicks.
The note with a free-text clinical notes field accepting a short entry and pre-populated ICD-10 diagnosis codes listed under Assessment and plan

Impact

What changed after launch

Official launch in 08/2026.

50/50Non-visit notes / Visit notes
90%Faster prescription renewal

“A dedicated non-visit note is much better than adding addenda. Updates stop getting lost in old follow-up notes, and the next provider can actually follow the patient's history.”

Dr. N., HealthTap

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