Kaiser Permanentea concept study
Telemed concept · skunkworks

Kaiser
Permanente

How virtual care could live inside the existing platform — before “telemed” was a thing anyone was building.

Kaiser already had My Doctor Online, a platform organized around individual doctors, each with their own page. Telemed wasn’t part of it and barely existed at the company. I was brought in on a genuine skunkworks effort — no KPIs, no roadmap slot, no promise anything would ship — to answer “what if?”

telemed doctors — directory
Meet the Kaiser Permanente Telemed doctors
MA
Dr. Maria Alvarez
Family Medicine · Mon–Fri 8a–5p
Video visit
JC
Dr. James Chen
Internal Medicine · Mon–Thu 9a–6p
Video visit
PS
Dr. Priya Shah
Pediatrics · Tue–Sat 8:30a–4:30p
Video visit
DO
Dr. Daniel Okafor
Cardiology · Mon–Fri 10a–3p
Video visit
Concept designInformation architectureWireframingFlow designKaiser Permanente · My Doctor Online
01The problem I was actually solving

A per-doctor flow is a maintenance burden that grows with the roster.

If telemed lived embedded on every doctor’s page, every flow would need building and syncing across a massive physician roster — the kind of structural cost that quietly compounds with the size of the organization. The interesting design problem wasn’t the screens; it was the architecture underneath them.

02The turn · invert it

One shared flow, contextual launch buttons.

The intuitive answer was to embed telemed on each doctor’s page. The spine of the concept was inverting that: instead of a telemed flow per doctor, one single shared telemed flow, with contextual launch buttons living on doctor pages. The shared home carries a persistent “Visit a Kaiser Permanente Doctor via Video” action — and renders context-aware.

No center attached

It asks you to pick one

Land on the shared home with no health center and it prompts you to choose — the empty state that opens the flow.

Center attached

It pre-fills everything

Arrive with one attached — a real pilot framing, the NV Health Center on the NVIDIA campus — and it pre-fills the location, address, and hours. Same page, two states, driven entirely by the context you came in with. No per-physician rebuild.

the shared home — one page, two context states

Generic state · no center
My Doctor OnlineVideo Visits
Visit a Kaiser Permanente doctor via video
Schedule a video appointment online, any time.
!
Select a health center to see doctors and available times.
Health center
Choose a location
Schedule Video Appointment Online
Contextual · NV Health Center
My Doctor OnlineVideo Visits
Visit a Kaiser Permanente doctor via video
Schedule a video appointment online, any time.
NV Health Center
Change
2701 San Tomas Expy, Santa Clara, CA 95050
NVIDIA campus · Mon–Fri 8:00a–5:00p
● Open nowNext slot 2:30p
Schedule Video Appointment Online
03The booking flow

A verified wizard that forks on the same context logic.

A verified booking wizard runs a short identity gate, then forks on exactly the context logic above: the context-passed path already knows the physician; the direct path asks the patient to choose one.

Last name
member match
Birth month & year
identity
Medical record #
verify
CAPTCHA
human check
Fork
known vs. choose

the booking wizard — same steps, forks on context

Direct entry · step 1 picks a doctor
Schedule a video appointment
1 2 36 steps
Step 1 of 6
Choose your location & doctor
Location / doctor
Select a location or doctor
NV Health Center — Santa Clara
Dr. Maria Alvarez · Family Medicine
Dr. James Chen · Internal Medicine
Continue
Context passed · “…physician at Nvidia”
Make a video appointment with a Kaiser Permanente physician at Nvidia
MA
Dr. Maria Alvarez · NV Health Center
Carried over from her page — no re-selection
Verify it’s you · step 2 of 6
Member last name
Rivera
Birth month / year
MM / YYYY
Medical record number
••• ••• •••
Verification
☐ I'm not a robot
Continue
THE SYSTEMDirectory & support

Launch from anywhere; the same flow catches you.

The doctors directory (in the hero) is where the launch buttons actually live — one per physician, beside their bio and hours. And an Hours & Appointments / FAQ layer handles the questions a new virtual-care patient predictably asks, so the concept reads end to end — all feeding the one shared flow rather than a maze of per-doctor variants.

hours & appointments / FAQ
Hours & Appointments
Video visit hours
Monday–Friday8:00a – 5:00p
Saturday9:00a – 1:00p
SundayClosed
Frequently asked
What do I need for a video visit?
Is a video visit covered by my plan?
How do I reschedule?
!Designing without a floor

No confirmed stack — so I inferred a provisional one.

The honest hard part was that a concept exploration has no floor under it — no confirmed technology. So I inferred a provisional stack from My Doctor Online to keep moving, rather than let the uncertainty stall the design. When there are no parameters, part of the job is manufacturing your own.

Where it landed & what it taught me

I do my sharpest work inside constraints — so here I had to build my own.

The output was a coherent telemed concept whose architecture solved the real scaling problem: one shared, context-aware flow reachable from anywhere, instead of a per-doctor burden that grew with the roster. Read today, when telemed is table stakes, the point isn’t the idea — it’s what the idea is made of. The work wasn’t the screens; it was the structure underneath them.

A concept exploration with no KPIs by design — so there are no measured outcomes to quote.