Discovery Research: A Contextual Inquiry into On-Formulary Functionality

Background

The Vantus HQ project at Cardinal Health aims to design and build a unified pharmaceutical ecommerce experience for all current Pharma customers, spanning desktop, mobile, and tablet experiences. With the completion of the project, Cardinal will retire the 8 current B2B storefronts.

The OE Acute platform offers unique product maintenance functionality, allowing customers to add custom attributes to products within the product catalog from which they purchase. One such custom attribute allowed users to mark products as On Formulary.

Users could update product attributes on individual Product Detail Pages or use a special tool that only exists on the OE Acute platform: Multi-Product Editing.

At stake for the redesign, then, were the product attributes that users could edit, and the mechanisms for editing those attributes.


Problem

Of 101,911 OE Acute Accounts, only 7,510 had On Formulary configured, about 7% of accounts. However, a number of large, high-purchasing health systems, such as Mayo Clinic Health Systems, used this feature. Conversations with Account Managers additionally revealed that many Account Managers were configuring On Formulary on behalf of customers. As a result of these considerations, I sought to understand how and why customers were using this feature to help the team decide:
Whether or not to include this feature in the new platform
How to design this feature in the new platform to increase self-service and decrease reliance on Account Managers


Research Approach

Remote Contextual Inquiry
Moderated remote sessions
Initial framing questions, then participants shared their screen and walked through their process for updating products
7 participants, who were responsible for marking products at On Formulary in their organizations


To analyze the research:

I affinity mapped notes to organize data and uncover themes.

I created a journey map to illustrate user pathways, interactions within and outside of the system, sentiments and pain points along different stages of the process, and recommendations.


Findings and Solutions

Mental Models:
While organizations use formularies to delimit the drugs they use in their hospitals and clinics, they do not use the On Formulary flag to indicate all drugs that fit within this category. Rather, they use the flag to indicate the preferred products that buyers should purchase among many options within the formulary

Participants used other product custom fields to supplement preferred products marked by the On Formulary flag, e.g. they indicated the secondary products to purchase, if the preferred products were out of stock in Message Text
While On Formulary is unique to the Acute platform, the way that customers used it was similar to Favoriting functionality on other platforms

Recommendation: Enhance the On Formulary product attribute to encompass a selection of product purchasing flags such as Preferred Alternative
Recommendation: Streamline On Formulary OE Acute functionality with Favoriting functionality on other platforms being integrated in Vantus HQ

Customer Goals:
Using On Formulary helps customers achieve strategic goals, particularly saving money, reaching contract compliance, achieving operational efficiencies, providing a consistent standard of care, and helping buyers.

Driving customers toward particular NDCs for products can help customers save significant sums. One noted achieving a couple of millions of dollars in savings within the first couple of months of operationalizing On Formulary.

The emphasis on contract compliance with Cardinal could help Cardinal achieve greater profits when customers use On Formulary.

Current Pain Points:
The biggest impediment to customer self-service is difficulty understanding how to correctly format a file for import in Multi-Product Editing. This function allows users to update the On Formulary flag for thousands of products at once, but customers do not know how to use it because we don’t provide any guidance.

Recommendation: Providers users with more information on how to correctly format files to use this feature

Large customers with over 200 accounts are divided into multiple organizations within OE Acute. These customers must duplicate work to update On Formulary because while settings can be copied across accounts, they cannot be copied across organizations. Moreover, separating Multi-Product Editing by accounts precludes a comprehensive organization and account view

Recommendation: Allow users to copy changes across organizations
Recommendation: In the redesign, consider optimizing the structure of Multi-Product Editing to begin with a cross-organization view (if the customer has multiple organizations) and allowing customers to drill down into individual organizations and accounts

Overall, 8 recommendations were created to improve the design for Vantus HQ and address current pain points and limitations


Outcomes
Based on customer insights:

The Vantus leadership team decided to incorporate On Formulary and a product editor into the new platform and add them to the product backlog

The Path-to-Purchase product team decided to include On Formulary as 1 of 10 dynamic product attributes on the Search Results Page

The Path-to-Purchase product team added an enhancement ticket to the backlog to expand the functionality of the On Formulary flag

The Vantus leadership team decided to investigate how On Formulary functionality could be streamlined with Favoriting functionality on other platforms, to create one new capability instead of redesigning disparate functionalities