Designing Connected Care for 100+ Locations
The challenge beneath the brief
Bayshore HealthCare operates across 100+ locations nationwide, delivering in-home and clinical care. The brief was to build a patient/family portal — but the real challenge was navigating a three-sided user ecosystem (families, caregivers, practitioners) where trust, privacy, and clinical accuracy aren't features — they're table stakes.
Bayshore was an early adopter of a cloud-based home-care platform's APIs, which meant we were building a custom front-end on infrastructure that was still maturing. That created a dual design constraint: the experience needed to feel polished and trustworthy (this is healthcare — people are anxious), while the underlying data model was still being negotiated with the platform provider.
What I focused on
User separation with shared context. The portal serves three user types whose needs overlap but whose access requirements are very different. A family member needs visibility into care schedules and status. A caregiver needs to log visits and flag concerns. A practitioner needs to coordinate across both. I designed role-specific views that surfaced the right information at the right fidelity for each user, while maintaining a shared context so that no one felt like they were seeing a different version of reality.
Trust through transparency. In healthcare, the gap between "the system works" and "I trust the system" is enormous. I focused on making system state visible — confirming when updates were received, showing who had access to what, and making the care timeline legible to non-clinical family members. Small design decisions (showing caregiver names and photos, surfacing visit confirmation timestamps, using plain language instead of clinical codes) had outsized impact on trust.
Pilot-first validation. Rather than designing for 100+ locations at once, we launched a pilot at the Barrie, Ontario location serving 1,000+ clients. This let me observe real usage, identify where the care coordination model broke down in practice, and refine workflows before the broader rollout.
Impact
The portal launched as MyBayshoreCare.ca in September 2018, serving 350,000+ patients annually across Bayshore's national network. It reduced fragmented communication across channels, gave families meaningful visibility into care delivery, and opened a new digital revenue channel through embedded eCommerce for supplementary services.
The deeper impact was establishing a design precedent for how Bayshore approached digital products — shifting from "digitize the paper process" to "design the care experience."