Antara Health

Overview

Antara Health was a virtual-first primary care company in Kenya with about 40,000 members. The tech newsletter Not Boring wrote about the company while I was there. I joined as the first designer, when there was no product yet — just a clinical model and a small team. I was the only designer for the first two years. The company closed in 2025 after investors stopped funding it.

The product had to be simple enough for patients with limited digital literacy, and structured enough for care coordinators tracking dozens of cases at once. I lived in Nairobi in 2022–2023, worked from the office, and took part in in-person usability testing with patients and clinicians.

What I Did

• Designed the patient app and Scribe, the internal web app for doctors, Health Navigators and managers, from zero to launch: discovery, information architecture, interaction design, and handoff
• Designed the patient app for booking, follow-ups, and health records, for users with limited digital literacy
• Designed patient queues, at-risk flags, intervention logs, and suggested care pathways in Scribe, automating over 60% of the work that doesn’t involve seeing patients
• Designed sign-up through WhatsApp and dependant accounts, so parents could add their children to their membership, including a new service for parents
• Redesigned the onboarding I had built earlier after its numbers came in weak: brought the case to the Member Experience team first, presented it with them to the product owner, and shipped it
• Hired two designers, including an intern I mentored into a full team member
• Tested flows with UX researchers before they went to engineering: usability interviews in the R&D stage, then in-person tests with patients and clinicians
• Built a lightweight design system to keep the product consistent as the team grew
• Started reviewing builds against the designs: in early 2023 I showed the team how far releases had drifted from the mockups, then logged each mismatch in the patient app and in Scribe for engineering to fix

Research: My Health

My Health is the part of the patient app where members see their diagnosis, lab results, and monthly plan from their Health Navigator, the care coordinator assigned to each member. Before rebuilding it in early 2023, a researcher and I ran a comparative usability test of two prototypes: one grouped the information into sections, the other put a short health summary and the latest readings at the top.

We tested with 22 members, including people with chronic conditions and people at risk of them: 20 sessions in person in Nairobi and 2 online, 40–60 minutes each. Clinicians from the care team joined as observers for the first time.

• 10 of 22 wanted their health status and latest readings on the first screen
• 10 of 22 needed a short summary to make sense of the numbers, in their words, “do I have a condition?”
• 7 of 22 asked for charts instead of numbers to see whether they were getting better
• 13 of 22 expected reminders and check-ins from Antara rather than coming back on their own
• 20 of 22 understood the terms after a few renames: milestones became targets, plans became activities, readings became labs & vitals

The main conclusion was that the app supports the relationship between a member and their Health Navigator rather than replacing it. Based on these findings we shipped My Health 2.0: the summary and latest readings on top, a short tour for first-time users, manual entry of readings, and trends for blood pressure and blood sugar that compare each new set of readings with the previous one.

Back Part-time

In October 2024 Antara asked me back part-time.

When members booked a virtual doctor consultation, they chose how to pay: 2,500 KSh per visit from their insurance outpatient benefits, or unlimited consultations with an Antara membership for a flat 1,500 KSh a quarter. Side by side, one visit cost more than three months of membership. The screen shipped but was live only briefly.

In early 2025 we looked at how AI could help the care team. One prototype turned the start screen of Scribe into a queue of member cards: each says why the member needs attention and what to do next, and the coordinator moves between cards with the arrow keys.

Outcome

With Scribe, clinical capacity grew from 206 to 800 patients per clinician and adherence to care protocols rose by 25%. Sign-up through WhatsApp was part of a growth push that brought more than 5,000 new subscriptions. Sustained engagement in the patient app rose from 33% to 55% after the onboarding redesign and features such as health progress tracking and adherence check-ins. All figures are from company reports.

The product launched and was used by clinical staff across multiple sites in Kenya.

In usability sessions in Nairobi I also met members who had reached their health goals: one fit back into jeans two sizes smaller, one was no longer short of breath, and one got quick help from their Health Navigator while on a business trip.