A patient portal people actually want to open
Booking, test results and prescriptions brought together in one accessible platform for a network of 60 clinics.
- Client
- Atlas Health
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 24 weeks
01Overview
Atlas Health runs 60 outpatient clinics across the north of England. Patients juggled three separate logins to book appointments, read test results and reorder prescriptions, so most of them simply picked up the phone. Atlas asked us to design and build one portal for all of it.
Results
68%
of appointments now booked online
−52%
calls to clinic reception desks
AA
WCAG 2.2 audit passed first time
02The challenge
The portal had to work for everyone, from a nineteen-year-old on a cracked phone screen to an eighty-two-year-old using a screen reader. It also had to sit on top of four clinical systems that could not be replaced.
03Our approach
Designing with patients, not for them
We tested every key journey with patients aged 18 to 91, including people with low vision, limited mobility and little confidence online.
Plain language everywhere
Together with the Atlas clinical team we rewrote more than 300 screens of medical copy, bringing the average reading age down to eleven.
One front door, four systems
Our engineers built a lightweight layer over the existing clinical systems, so patients see one tidy record while clinics keep the tools they rely on.
04The outcome
Two thirds of appointments are now booked online, freeing thousands of hours of reception time every month. The portal passed an independent WCAG 2.2 AA audit on its first attempt.
For the first time, our patients tell us that dealing with us online is easy. That is a sentence I never expected to hear.
Project team
James WhitakerManaging Partner
Lena HoffmannDesign Director
Daniel TanHead of Engineering
Sofia MarínStrategy Lead