In the depths of the pandemic, I began working with a group that focuses on helping people find and receive the healthcare they need through technologies to streamline their processes. Cutting through the confusion of insurance coverage or connecting them to secondary services, such as rides to appointments (“Non-Emergency Medical Transport” – NEMT), managing medical equipment, connecting with wellness plans, or being a compassionate helping hand with less familiar options like telehealth.
My friend and sometimes colleague Joe Peacock introduced me to the opportunity, and said “I know you have reservations about working in this industry, but I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think it was worth it.”
On entering Anthem’s Exponential Health Products & Technology group, it turned out Joe was right. A collective of like-minded experts who sincerely wished to combine our efforts to do all of the above and more: explore what more can be done for underserved communities and those often left out of considerations when it came to healthcare and related tech solutions. This attitude and approach has been a part of the corporate rebranding to Elevance Health, “Transforming from a traditional Health Benefits Organization to a Lifetime Health partner.”
The primary activities I’ve done so far in my time with Anthem/Elevance:
- Conceptualization and requirements discovery for multiple products
- User research to test those concepts before even thinking of producing anything (you may be surprised how rare this is!)
- Including widespread surveys for quantitative data
- In-depth interviews for more qualitative knowledge
- Rapid prototyping – usually done in Figma – to show, explore, test, and refine the flows, interactions, and UI with both internal stakeholders, current users or members, and larger portions of the population based on prospective user types
- Productively argued for user needs, making sure products we design and build are focused on the needs of actual people
- Especially if there are often obstacles for some groups of people based on accessibility, income, internet access, age, race, sexual orientation, sex and/or gender identity, if they are living with disability, and so on. Technology is too often made for a presumptive audience, so without diverse research and diverse researchers & designers, their needs are often left in the gaps, even if good intent is assumed.
- Thankfully, the arguments were around how to do these things better, not if they were problems in the first place!
- Building and testing corporate product design pattern library, something so many companies need to do, even after doing UX work for a long time – thankfully, I enjoy this sort of thing.
- Scrum-mastering for the UX Product Team
- It’s not all of the glamour of making prototypes, alas!
Sample prototypes, planning docs & design samples forthcoming to make sure they don’t touch upon anything Anthem-confidential or otherwise ethically & professionally inappropriate.
Update!
Case Study: Care Market – the foundational early research and analysis leading to a health services platform.
(note: heavily edited and debranded to respect the confidentiality and ethical necessity of the shared information)
(updated 8 AUG 2022)