User behavior analytics for the health tech space
TL;DR
At Karuna Health, complying with HIPAA and other health data security regulations is always top of mind. When Karuna needed a solution to react to frontend issues more efficiently, they had to find something that would accurately reveal errors without exposing sensitive patient health information to any third parties.
LogRocket’s self hosted Product Experience Monitoring solution fit their use case perfectly.
“We don’t have to strip sensitive information from errors because we don’t send that information anywhere outside of the organization. Having the on-prem version of LogRocket is super valuable for us,” says Antares Meketa, Chief Product Officer at Karuna Health.
In addition to fixing frontend issues, Karuna also uses LogRocket to gain insight into how consumers are really using their product. This helps the organization iterate on features according to user behavior to ensure their products are as intuitive as possible.
“With session recording, it’s interesting to see people navigate your app and use your features. You can see them thinking with their cursor, hovering over something, and pausing,” Antares said. “We can watch flows and see if people actually have a good understanding of how to use our features or not.”
Faster issue resolution, fewer touches
Karuna Health’s care coordination solution helps patients and providers share sensitive information related to clinical care delivery.
“There are two categories of problems we solve for our customers,” explained Karuna CPO Antares Meketa. “One is about how patients and providers can reach out to the people they know they need to reach out to, and how those people can in turn contact them.”
“You sometimes have people coming from underprivileged backgrounds, and they may change phone numbers and addresses frequently,” Antares said. “So we help providers stay in contact with those people so they can easily reach them to schedule clinical appointments, and then we also enable therapeutic conversations over phone or text.”
Karuna provides a single point of communication for care management agencies, providers, and patients to ensure those with chronic conditions or complex health needs can see the specialists they need to see, complete follow-up instructions, and stay in touch with their care teams.
One way Karuna does this is by enabling asynchronous communication between patients and providers, which allows patients to more easily touch base with their providers and get answers to health or care access questions on their own. With asynchronous communication, Karuna allows its customers to layer on lightweight and invisible automation, like after-hours responses or automated outreach, saving providers time and letting them focus on their highest-need patients.
Karuna’s solution is available to users on a mobile app built using React Native. LogRocket easily integrates with Karuna Health’s tech stack to help them diagnose any error from any individual, regardless of what browser they use.
“Having access to all of that information in a clean way has been such a boon in terms of figuring out where to start debugging.”
Antares has been with Karuna Health for a little over a year now, and he’s seen firsthand how the organization dealt with bugs before and after integrating LogRocket into its tech stack.
Before implementing LogRocket, Karuna Health engineers had to reproduce bugs on their own to find out what went wrong in the code. Support staff needed to directly touch base with customers who had run into snags to diagnose problems in their app.
“We had to do secure screen sharing, which requires synchronous participation with customers,” Antares said.
“There were a few really brutal bugs we got stuck on for a long time because we didn’t have LogRocket in place.”
Frequently, Karuna’s customers would struggle to articulate the problems they were seeing with sufficient technical detail to help Karuna support troubleshoot and diagnose the problem. Working directly with those customers to identify issues and resolve bugs was often a difficult and slow process that required a heavy time investment from Karuna’s engineering team.
“The macro emergence behavior of that problem is so disconnected from what’s actually going wrong in the code.”
In one example, after a significant amount of time, Karuna engineers deduced that an error in the URL itself had been causing browser requests to fail.
After adding LogRocket to their arsenal, Karuna engineers and support staff can now see customer-facing issues in their code without relying on customers to try to direct them to the problem.
“Being able to quickly resolve issues and understand the root causes has been super valuable,” Anatres said. “Whenever we want to solve problems, there’s a clear value prop.”
Additionally, Karuna engineers can now take a more proactive approach to resolving errors by identifying common bugs that users either ignore or opt not to report.
“We’ll think about issues we frequently get, and we’ll try to understand what may be causing those,” said Antares. “LogRocket lets us figure that out as quickly as possible, and take an error that maybe came in as an intermittent thing, or that someone ignored and moved on from, and get access to that problem.”
Reducing overall time spent on fixing issues isn’t the only benefit of the tool for Karuna. Antares pointed out that allowing customers to stay out of the debugging process also improves UX in an unquantifiable but important way.
“LogRocket has helped us avoid much longer, potentially relationship-damaging conversations with our users.”
Avoiding occasionally frustrating back-and-forths with consumers saves time for both Karuna Health engineers and their users. Seamlessly and quietly resolving bugs without requiring user involvement gives customers a smoother overall experience with the product.
Simplifying healthcare data security compliance
Because Karuna operates in the healthcare space, they need to carefully consider health data security regulations when implementing new tools. Using LogRocket’s on-prem solution allows Karuna to protect sensitive patient health data while monitoring user behavior in their app.
“Everything is recorded on our own servers using AWS,” Antares explained. “Having it set up that way is critical for us to be able to do this.”
Other software solutions Karuna uses don’t offer an on-prem solution, so Karuna is required to build custom software to safely redact patient information before sending it to those services in order to ensure HIPAA compliance. This can make it more difficult to accurately observe user behavior in the app.
“It’s a breath of fresh air to have these kinds of products in our ecosystem, we don’t have to strip sensitive information from errors because we don’t send that information anywhere outside of the organization.”
Leveraging user behavior to inform product development and usability
Karuna has come to use LogRocket for more than just debugging frontend issues. They’ve also leveraged the session replay tool to make decisions during product development that improve feature usability.
Optimizing UX is a huge part of Karuna’s mission. Its software automates care management tasks so that providers can simplify care coordination for patients, so usability is a key feature for its products.
“We develop features and close the loop by watching people use new features and seeing how they’re doing it, it’s spot-checking, basically.”
Watching how users interact with their app has revealed specific ways Karuna engineers and product teams can further fine-tune their product. They can see where users’ cursors stall to get an idea of where consumers are potentially experiencing uncertainty or confusion while using the app.
Karuna applied these observations about user behavior to modify its patient registration feature, which provides a flow to help customers add new patients to the system that don’t have direct data integration with Karuna Health.
“We were looking at this flow for adding new patients to the system,” Antares said. “And someone was reporting that they thought the flow was slightly inconvenient. We were able to use LogRocket to go back and watch how users navigate the flow and see if people were really understanding the feature.”
“It exposed all sorts of things that can improve Karuna’s UX,” Antares added.
Using these insights, Karuna Health’s engineering and product teams were able to begin iterating changes to the feature design to enable a more intuitive experience for end users.
“I can see LogRocket becoming a replacement for some of the APM tools we currently use.”
Right now, Karuna uses several tools to gain insight into how users interact with their product, each with its own security compliance requirements.
With LogRocket, Karuna Health can keep a sharp eye on any issues cropping up in their frontend code and maintain an accurate read on user behavior — all while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
If you want to see how LogRocket can boost UX for your users like it did for Karuna Health, click here to sign up for a free 14-day trial.
