— CAMBIA HEALTH SOLUTIONS —
Delivering innovative health care through insurance, technology, and personalized services
OVERVIEW
Cambia Health Solutions offers health insurance, technology, and personalized care through over 25 subsidiaries, including Regence BlueCross BlueShield, Asuris, BridgeSpan, Journi, SpendWell Health, and MedSavvy, serving over 3 million consumers. In my role, I managed all Product Design and UX initiatives across Cambia’s portfolio, encompassing B2C, B2B, R&D, SaaS, and internal projects.
The Problem
Cambia was experiencing rapid growth, but our internal processes and workflows were becoming stagnant and obsolete. Consumers were demanding more useful, relevant, and empathetic experiences. Despite our "Person-Focused" mission, our business practices weren't fully aligned with this goal. We needed to transform from old, legacy practices to a more informed, human-centered, and cohesive approach. This transformation was necessary but posed significant challenges.
The Task
We set out to leverage existing research and conduct new internal and external studies to guide Cambia's mission. Our aim was to ensure that we not only built the right experiences but also built them right. This required comprehensive enterprise-wide process overhauls, the creation of new frameworks, and the development of materials to support this transformation.
MY ROLE: SENIOR UX MANAGER
RESPONSIBILITIES
Research allocation, facilitation, and synthesis
Project management
Agency allocation and contract management
Content Strategy and production management
Budget procurement
Cross-functional comms management
PROJECT DURATION: ~8 MONTHS
CHALLENGES
Balancing concurrent projects across the Cambia/Regence product portfolio
Ensuring effective communication with dozens of inter-departmental stakeholders
Collecting and synthesizing the right research
Ensuring efficient and effective workshopping
Change management 😬
CHALLENGES
Gathering the right research and plan for new projects to fill the knowledge gaps
Wrangling busy stakeholders to participate and engage in the project
Gathering relevant process and workflow pain points related to Cambia’s product development lifecycle
Aligning on the right frameworks that fit our unique business culture and needs
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Enterprise Adoption and Alignment: Achieved the goal of informing Cambia about its consumer archetypes and behaviors while embedding Human-Centered Design (HCD) scaffolding within the enterprise
Leveraged and Produced New Insights: Gathered and synthesized multifaceted research to provide empirical guidance
Established a Central Research and Design Repository: Transformed a chaotic, disparate data and research business into a unified single source of truth
Product Design and Development Integration: Trained marketing, product, and customer service teams to embed HCD into their workflows
ASSESSING THE STATE OF THE ENTERPRISE
Where do we stand?
Upon joining Cambia, my first mission was to conduct an in-depth assessment of business processes, research data and practices, product development workflows, pain points (both consumer and internal), and overall business maturity in relation to human-centered practices.
Overall, I found there were four foundational components we needed to focus on to ensure we’re working effectively while delivering quality and meaningful experiences:
Principles & Strategy Each business division has a documented and socialized set of strategic goals. To ensure consistency and a unified experience, foundational UX, CX, and business principles (covering brand, CRM, ops, IT, etc.) are established.
Culture Cambia’s vision is adopted and embraced by employees, who are passionate, informed, and equipped with the necessary tools and support to fulfill the mission.
Formulation Effective tools, workflows, processes, methodologies, and resources are implemented to create the best products and services. We prioritize smart, nimble building with outcomes over output.
Metrics & Analytics (KPIs, OKRs, reports) Quantifiable success measures are essential. Practical UX and CX metrics are regularly monitored and communicated. Quantitative and qualitative data insights guide business, UX, and CX decisions.
A Gap Analysis was conducted for each component and the high-level results were visualized for the team(s). Effectively, we were able to dig in deeper to pinpoint and prioritize our foundational work, starting with the “Principles & Strategy” and worked our way up.
An implementation plan was devised and communicated:
THE WHO, WHAT, WHY OF OUR CONSUMER: NEED-FINDING VIA RESEARCH
We sifted through extensive research and conducted new studies to fully understand our consumers' healthcare journeys.
Our best research showed there were six archetypes into which our consumers fit. While people may shift over their lifetime, archetypes are based on relatively fixed attributes of people that influence their relationship with health and health care. We actively trained our teams to deeply understand these six types and put them at the center of any product, service, or experience they are designing.
Some samples of our consumer archetypes:
MOMENT OF INTERCEPT MATTERS
The moment of intercept is an essential dimension to interpreting the archetypes. Even a highly resilient person will struggle in a high-vulnerability moment. Even someone with low resilience can engage constructively in a low-vulnerability moment.
This is a mid-life snapshot of the ups and downs in life that could make a difference in customer preferences and expectations.
FROM A RAG-TAG GROUP TO AN ENTERPRISE DESIGN TEAM
We joined forces with other in-house designers across Cambia to form the “Experience Design (XD)” team. We unified our operations and resources and created a Design Principles guide, which was communicated and shared across the Cambia enterprise.
STREAMLINING OUR WORKFLOWS AND PROCESSES
One of our most challenging and time-consuming tasks was to assess, scope, and draft new Design and Product Development workflows. This monumental effort required collaboration with multiple stakeholders and teams. While tangible artifacts are limited, here’s a mid-fidelity process diagram that captures one of the many iterations of our evolving process.
RESULTS AND SUMMARY
Anyone who’s participated in a business process overhaul and change management knows that one size doesn’t fit all. Every business has its unique culture, contexts, and priorities. One thing's for certain: collaboration, grit, and a bit of steadfast persistence can make a significant difference. This project took about a year to complete overall, and I've only showcased a snippet here. Below are some tracked metrics and outcomes, highlighting both the wins and some challenges we faced.
PRODUCT AND DESIGN WORKFLOW
+35%: Turnaround time speed increase! Created joint workflows with design, product, dev, marketing, and research removing the siloed work streams, and process improvements
+25%: Increased throughput. Our agile sprint task efficiency (design and dev) compared to previous projects from 2 quarters prior
+25%: More research and usability projects embedded within our development streams. This ultimately resulted in higher quality, and more desirable output
⚠️ Some stones potentially left unturned? Some feedback reported that there where some folks who felt their input wasn’t solicited and wanted to participate
BUSINESS
Strong Alliances Forged: Established trusted and lasting inter-departmental and cross-functional alliances across the Cambia/Regence enterprise
⚠️ 2 Months past scheduled deadline: The project slipped by about 2 months due to unforeseen events — mostly related to research logistics and reliance on an outside agency for market research
HCD Adoption: After conducting training, workshops, and producing ongoing “State of UX” reporting, our entire Cambia product development and marketing teams began using the tools and resources we developed — this was a huge win
EXPERIENCE
Avg of 68: SUS (System Usability Score) on selected and high-impact consumer experiences
Avg 79%: CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score across all apps and experiences. Indicating a large number of users are satisfied with the app. This is +6% higher than other comparable companies in the health care industry