Patient Portals

Patient portals are among the main reasons we created Riolu. One of our cofounders noticed that many seniors would miss their scheduled medication times or be unable to contact their doctors easily, and recognized the gravity of the situation. Thus, this is a more important and serious topic for us at Riolu.

Usually patient portals are just apps or websites that some sort of medical organization uses to communicate, in our context it's mainly used to read messages, upload documents, and request refills for medicine. As time grew, we began to notice how small interface choices can slow people down: unclear button labels, extra windows, or menus that hide the next step. A common example is results viewing: the user taps "Results," lands on a list with unfamiliar terms, then must open a detailed view and scroll to find a "View PDF" link that downloads rather than opening in the page. This process is highly confusing for many seniors who aren't used to using the internet for important messages and documents.

We like to think of this topic as boot camp here at Riolu; we have to provide a concise yet thorough explanation of all the main functions that seniors use their portals for. We try to use clear wording and simple, numbered steps to make the tasks seem systematic, which, in turn, simplifies complex tasks into "follow the steps" assignments. The aim is practical: reduce confusion, shorten recovery from errors, and help users finish the task they came for.

As mentioned previously, this is one of the most important topics for us here at Riolu, and we like to put genuine effort into providing the best educational experience for our seniors. We start the process by recognizing that there are many different portals and uses for each, and that there is simply too much material to teach in one class. This concession leads us to explain why we take the approach of an overall explanation of the most important aspects. This leads us into our numbered process, which we keep general to apply to almost all tasks.

On this topic, we do take many losses and are forced to concede on some points, but that doesn't mean we don't teach it to the best of our abilities. We turn our concessions into logical reasoning that can be followed to lead to our simple checklist, which we provide to seniors as a foolproof plan to counter our worst enemy: variation.