Designing an Integrated Addiction Care Service and Platform (YourPath + Sala)

Context

YourPath is committed to improving access to addiction treatment. For many individuals seeking help, the care journey begins at a moment of crisis—but instead of receiving support quickly, people are often asked to complete long, repetitive forms to prove eligibility or to register with different providers.

On the staff side, teams were navigating multiple systems to gather patient information, enter it into the EHR, coordinate referrals, and track progress. This slowed care and increased emotional and administrative burden for everyone involved.

To address these challenges, we built Sala: a real-time care coordination platform and lightweight EHR designed to streamline communication and significantly reduce repetitive form-filling for both patients and staff.

The Challenge

Prior to Sala, patients repeatedly entered the same demographic, medical, and history information across multiple paper and digital intake forms. This often happened during vulnerable moments, while experiencing withdrawal symptoms, or under urgent time constraints.

Meanwhile, staff had to manually re-enter this same information into an EHR, often copying it from scanned forms or chat transcripts. This resulted in:

  • Redundant data entry for patients and staff

  • Increased wait times for treatment placement

  • Inconsistent or incomplete information across systems

  • Reduced time for meaningful patient engagement

Our goal was to design a unified service experience that:

  1. Eliminated redundant form completion for patients

  2. Consolidated staff workflows into a single platform

  3. Automatically transferred completed forms and data into the EHR

  4. Adapted to varied workflows across internal teams and external partner organizations

My Role

I worked at the intersection of care operations and the product team. My responsibilities included:

  • Mapping existing form flows and documentation requirements across roles

  • Identifying where redundancy occurred and the impact on patient experience

  • Designing a unified intake form and data model that could serve multiple care steps

  • Working with engineers to enable one-click transfer of completed forms into the EHR

  • Supporting rollout to internal teams and then external partners, adapting workflows as needed

This required deep empathy for both the emotional reality of seeking treatment and the operational realities of clinical documentation and compliance.

Research & Key Insights

Through interviews, workflow observation, and service mapping, we surfaced core insights:

Insight

Patients filled out multiple forms collecting the same personal + medical information

Staff manually re-entered data from forms into the EHR

Different care roles needed different views of the same data

Impact on Experience

Emotional fatigue and unnecessary delay in care

Time-consuming, error-prone documentation

Staff struggled to quickly understand “the whole person”

Opportunity

Capture information once and reuse it throughout the care journey

Automate transfer of form data into existing systems

Create role-based summaries drawing from one shared data source

These insights directly informed workflow and platform design