Medical Note is a health tech venture founded by active doctors in 2014. With the vision of "connecting doctors and patients", we are developing services that enable patients to visit doctors and medical institutions without hesitation. Our main product, Medical Note, a medical information media, currently has more than 10 million users who have medical problems. We provide reliable medical information under the supervision of medical specialists and other medical professionals, as well as medical consultation services for users suffering from symptoms. We also provide medical consultation services for users suffering from symptoms. We interviewed Mr. Matsuoka, who is in charge of the media business, and Mr. Tomiyama and Mr. Maeda, who are in charge of the field, about their business and how Ptengine helps them.

Points of the interview

• The drastic change in the healthcare system caused by Corona, and the mission Medical Note has for its users
• How Ptengine played an active role in a situation where development resources could not be allocated to media improvement
• What kind of behavior-based personalization does the medical information media need to focus on?

A tactile digital experience aims to dispel patient fears

Q. What is the mission of Medical Note?

Medical Note's vision is to "connect doctors and patients", and our mission is to create a digital interface between patients, medical institutions and doctors, and to lower the barriers to consultation.

In the recent confusion caused by the coronary heart disease, there has been a growing concern that people are refraining from undergoing medical examinations and check-ups, which should be done. In addition to the inability of medical institutions to provide treatment at the right time, this is also having an impact on their financial situation and is having a major impact on the healthcare system itself.

I believe that healthcare has been one of the most volatile industries over the past year due to Corona. One of the main reasons for this change was the conditional opening of online medical services, which led to many companies, including LINE Healthcare, entering the digital x medical space. However, there are still many challenges in terms of UIUX for online medical services, and the market has not yet been fully established, so we believe that it is most important for the industry to work together to create as many successful experiences as possible in the digital x medical field.

With Corona, it is now more important than ever to eliminate the anxiety of the patient. Our mission is to create a tactile experience for the user in the area of contact with doctors and hospitals, such as the provision of information and email consultations before the consultation.

We needed Ptengine because we couldn't devote development resources to improving the media

Q. What are the challenges you face in creating a successful digital X medical experience?

At the moment our services are concentrated in a medium called Medical Note. We are now in a phase where we want to quickly experiment with connecting users and medical institutions, but due to a lack of development resources we have not been able to proceed.

One of the reasons for this is the development of online medical tools for medical institutions: the announcement of the conditional opening of online medical services in March 2020, the release of the first stage in June, and the release of the second stage in October, have brought development resources here as the situation has changed.

On the other hand, there is also the issue of development flow. As we hadn't made any major system changes since the beginning of the company, the website was in a somewhat legacy state, and there were a number of problems that arose in various areas even when implementing a simple navigation system.

Because of this situation, even though we had set the number of patients sent from the media as the most important KPI, the list of measures that we had was still stuck in the list of measures. This list of measures was a big dilemma for her and the rest of the team, as we had entrusted the KPIs themselves to Maeda, a new graduate at the time, who had analysed and devised them.

One stop for one non-engineer from planning to implementation and verification cycle

Q. How has Ptengine been of value to your company?

We used to use Google Optimize for AB testing, but when we tried to test with rich UI and components, we had to implement it by engineers. In addition, it was not possible to implement the verification process at a satisfactory level. We set aside a few months to assign an engineer whose main job was to improve the UI and test hypotheses, and worked with the director to build a system for small releases. We were able to put together a team that could design and implement the measures based on a certain understanding of the background of the measures, but there were many issues that arose in the actual implementation phase, and we were unable to release the measures at the speed we had expected.

During the trial period, we tested whether the verification process, which previously required development by engineers, could be carried out by non-engineering members only. As a result, we found that we could get the flow and results we were looking for, and that we could run the verification process at high speed, so we decided to implement it.

We're still rolling out measures as we go along, but we can go from planning to implementation in a day if it's simple, or in a week if it's a bit bigger. A further unexpected benefit is the low learning cost. We feel that the simplicity of the UI makes it a strong ally for non-engineers.

We've also been able to implement a new and very efficient development workflow that takes what we've done into the production environment. This has saved us a lot of time internally, and I think it's great that we can fail before we build.

The strength of Ptengine is that it is sensitive to the handling of personal data and can be personalised by user behaviour

Q. What results have you achieved in the speedy implementation of your measures?

We ran an AB test where we showed a pop-up with examples of medical advice for people suffering from a real disease. This resulted in a 23% improvement compared to not showing it. This kind of result can be seen with each measure.

We hold the personal information of our registered members. We hold personal information about our registered members, and we are very sensitive about how we handle this information as it is directly related to their personal problems. We have been told that Ptengine can also be used to measure this kind of data, and we suggested that we could send out different guides depending on the actions taken by the visitor.

The information on which articles are viewed and the number of times they are visited gives us an idea of what they are struggling with and how serious their problems are, while the search queries on the site help us to identify their problems and optimise the content we present to them.

In order to ensure appropriate communication, we are developing a range of measures to test hypotheses about what information and action points we can provide to users who are in need of medical care in order to provide them with a better digital experience and connect them with their doctors.

As we have already seen in our research using Ptengine, users take a long time to consider and take action after their first visit to the content. Therefore, we would like to spend more time on customer nurturing, for example, by encouraging return visits and strengthening user targeting based on the number of visits.

On the other hand, it is our mission to reduce the amount of time users spend confused about medical treatment, so we would like to strengthen our customer nurturing measures and use Ptengine to implement measures that can reduce the time it takes to take action.