Antara Health

Overview

Antara Health is a virtual-first primary care company in Kenya, now serving about 40,000 members. 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.

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 the clinical dashboard 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 the care-coordinator web app: patient queues, at-risk flags, intervention logs, and suggested care pathways, 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
• Proposed an onboarding redesign after seeing weak onboarding numbers, brought it to the Member Experience team first, and presented it with them to the product owner; the redesign was prioritized and shipped
• Hired two designers, including an intern I mentored into a full team member
• Worked with UX researchers to test most flows before release, and built a lightweight design system to keep the product consistent as the team grew

Outcome

With the coordinator web app, 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 May 2024 the company cut from about 120 people to 50, and my role was part of that cut. In October 2024 Antara asked me back part-time.