Designing the health insurance experience, ground up.
Introduction
For many, health insurance is a way to save money from expensive medical costs. But what if insurance could play a bigger role in saving lives too? In 2022, I was a part of an ambitious project with Traced Health, a health insurance platform that aims to improve health outcomes.
Scope
Team
James, CEO & Founder
Mackenzie, UX & UI Design
Neha, UX Design
Scope & Constraints
A short time frame during the discovery phase of this project meant an emphasis on market and user research
Role
UX Design
Duration
4 weeks
The worst health outcomes in history
Despite spending the most, the US has consistently ranked lowest when it comes to health outcomes (Figure 1). A myriad of reasons contribute to this phenomenon, but one in particular is the misalignment of patients and medical providers.
Figure 1. Health Care System Performance Compared to Spending Source: Eric C. Schneider et al., Mirror, Mirror 2021 — Reflecting Poorly: Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries (Commonwealth Fund, Aug. 2021). https://doi.org/10.26099/01DV-H208
The Problem
The true cost of a poor match
Typically, health insurance companies will matches people with providers in their area, rather than their medical needs. When a patient and provider are matched simply on the premise of location outcomes like mistreatment and misdiagnosis occur, which can render fatal outcomes, along with medical underperformance, and higher claims to pay out.
Rethinking traditional insurance models
Before delivering an inventive solution to this problem I had to understand the business needs. For Traced Health, the core need of the business at this time are to:
Design an innovative healthcare solution that garners attention of investors
Introduce transparency with insurance coverage and benefits
Business opportunities
Competitors are keeping people in the dark
Without pre-existing insights on how to improve health outcomes, we looked to understand the current landscape of health insurance. Almost all competitive services (see below) are keeping people in the dark. People often had unexpected charges and were limited to a small provider network, usually whoever is in their area.
The discovery
Trust is NOT the default status
There’s a gap in the market, but what can we learn from lived experiences? We interviewed 7 people who were poorly matched to providers. All participants had experienced some form of mistreatment, misdiagnosis, or over treatment from a medical provider. We asked them to tell us more about those experiences.
After interviewing, we saw emerging themes: lack of trust, miscommunication, and a lack of information. Truthfully, these didn’t surprise me, but what did was when interviewees said they wished they advocated for themselves more. One interviewee talked about how no one took her seriously because she had no friends or family beside her.
“...I have anxiety that deep down that no one really believes me...”
With this sentiment of not advocating enough, I started to think about what opportunities people had to talk to their medical provider and why those opportunities were failing them.
Putting power in people’s hands
When I initially took on this project, I was overwhelmed. How were we going to design a solution for what seemed to be systemic problem? User interviews were key in shifting my perspective.
Ideation
“...how might we improve the relationship between provider and patient?”
This a more complex issue than we initially thought, but the effects of this issue can be traced to everyday interactions between between both parties. So this begged the question, how might we improve the relationship between provider and patient?
How might we imbue more trust within the relationship?
Helpful information about medical providers, like a percentage match, keywords, and description
How might we help people be more knowledgable about their health insurance plan?
Why are people ending up with unexpected charges? A transparent dashboard to make get rid of the unexpected.
How might we empower patients to advocate for themselves?
We sketched up a variety of chat features to help people bridge the communication gap. While necessary, this was not designed right now because it failed to meet the business need of innovative design.
Improving access to care requires strengthening insurance
Despite iterating on rounds of sketches, it still felt like something was missing in our solution. Something more impactful on the patient-provider relationship.
Since we were no longer designing chat features for advocacy, we asked how could we reduce the need for advocacy in the first place? We designed a recommendation engine that matches people to provider based on their unique medical history rather than location for this reason.
Coverage front and center and full transparency with prescriptions on the dashboard
Instead of a percentage match, we decided the copy, 'Recommended for you’, was more humanizing in matching people to medical providers.
As designers:
we narrowed down the problem through research efforts
we solved for that problem through design
But did we actually solve the problem? With a short time frame and business needs that catered more to selling an idea, we had to choose our battles wisely. With very little research done initially, we put our efforts into upfront research to understand the problem. This left no time for testing, which is an absolute must for next steps to see if the solution we proposed works.