Transforming Specimen Procurement through Innovation and Automation
For cancer patients, time is everything. Foundation Medicine's core business goal reflected that urgency — to minimize turnaround time from specimen testing to reported findings, so physicians could make faster, better decisions about patient care.
As Senior Experience Designer embedded within an Agile team, I partnered with product owners and developers across research, discovery, and strategy. My focus was identifying bottlenecks, cross-dependencies, and opportunities where digital experiences could streamline workflows and keep the testing pipeline moving.
Role: Senior Product Designer | Team: Research, Strategy, Product, Engineering
Goals
The existing procurement process was largely manual — specimen requests sent by fax, questions handled by phone, and tracking managed by Microsoft Excel and Lotus Notes. The opportunity was clear: replace that manual effort with a secure, digital portal that could support real-time communication between Foundation Medicine and pathology labs, and eliminate the inefficiencies slowing down the pipeline.
For MVP Phase 1, the goal was to establish the foundation, conducting research to define the core experience pillars that would guide the portal design and development.
Research, Interviews and Concept Testing
As a Senior Experience Designer, I worked across the full arc of the project from designing solutions and facilitating workshops to running feature prioritization activities, synthesizing interview findings, and concept testing. I collaborated closely with the researcher, product lead, and strategist to ensure design decisions were grounded in both user needs and business goals.
We conducted multiple rounds of interviews and concept testing to build a clear picture of how pathology labs actually worked. We wanted to understand lab size and team structure, the jobs people were hired to do, the analog processes they relied on, and how communication flowed between teams and locations.
Labs were recruited across a range of sizes from small independent practices to mid and large operations and multi-location networks with cross-communicating staff. As each round of sessions wrapped, I translated findings into visual artifacts mapping the complexities of the customer journey, iterating design concepts, keeping the work moving in step with the research.
Key deliverables from this phase included theming and group our ideas from co-creation sessions, a journey map charting the full specimen procurement process identifying every opportunity where a digital experience could reduce manual efforts and improve speed. Those insights fed directly into brainstorming sessions with the product team and ultimately shaped the experience pillars guiding the MVP.
Experience Pillars
From our research, we defined the core experience pillars that would guide every design decision in the portal — serving as a north star for the team through MVP and beyond. With the pillars in place, we moved into design. The MVP centered on three core design solutions:
Email Notification to replace previous fax form with a View Specimen Request action that automatically triggers a change in status from new request to request received. FMI can then set reminder notifications for follow up calls.
All-specimen view to give lab managers a single dashboard to monitor every active case, with search, filter, quick actions, and bulk actions — replacing the fragmented, manual process with one unified workspace.
Specimen tracking that allows pathology lab staff and ordering physicians real-time visibility into where a specimen is in the pipeline, including an estimated reporting date. This reduces the support calls that were slowing everyone down.
Contact action allowed labs to update FMI on specimen details, delays, or issues directly through the portal. Known data was auto-filled to minimize effort and reduce errors.
MVP Design Solutions
By optimizing pathology workflows through this new online portal, the MVP accelerates critical NGS testing results for cancer patients when every day counts.