BlueCross | BlueShield

— REGENCE —

OVERVIEW

Regence BlueCross BlueShield covering nearly 2.8 million lives through family, individual, and employer group health plans, faced persistent challenges in enhancing the digital experience of its members. Leading the Pain Points team, I worked with cross-functional colleagues driving initiatives to deeply understand and resolve these complex and crucial issues, transforming the digital journey for our members.

MY ROLE: SR UX Design Manager

MY RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Strategic and tactical design lead

  • Project management/ownership

  • Budgeting and resource allocation

  • Research planning and facilitation

  • Stakeholder comms and collaborative workshopping

TEAM(S): Product Management | Product Design | Engineering | CX | Research | Customer Service | Marketing | Executive Leadership

PEOPLE & PARTNERS

  • 2 Product Managers

  • CX Manager

  • SR Enterprise Architect

  • 2 UX Designers, 1 Researcher

  • Director of Digital Engagement

  • Customer Service Manager

CHALLENGES

  • Balancing concurrent projects across the Cambia/Regence product portfolio

  • Ensuring effective communication across inter-departmental stakeholders

  • Limited research resources

  • Very high visibility project with much at stake — The pressure’s on! 🧐

PROJECT DURATION

  • 6 months: Strategic planning, research, definition, ideation, prototyping, UX/UI design

THE PROBLEM:

Health plan members experience frustration at multiple points when interacting with the Regence digital experience (specifically, the Treatment Cost Estimator, Provider Search, Account Access, and Message Center). These all happen to be CORE and valuable features within our member portal.

THE TASK

  • Understand what consumers want, need, and expect from digital interactions with their health insurance

  • Create a set of principles based on this understanding that will act as a guide for, and check on, all designs

  • Use these principles to design an overarching digital experience that meets consumers’ needs

STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT

Setting the vision, direction, and scope

We kicked off the project by prioritizing business and consumer needs, and framing our scope upon the “McKinsey’s Three Horizon’s Framework” which offers a way to concurrently manage both current and future opportunities for growth, innovation, and experiential progression.

WHAT WE LEARNED: MEMBER EXPECTATIONS

Table Stakes

Members see these as bare-minimum requirements for a digital experience that are not being met currently:

  • Clearly explain their benefits and how to access them

  • Help understand cost and billing

  • Provide an accurate, updated, easily searchable list of in-network providers and facilities

Less is More

Members are already overwhelmed by health insurance. They want our site/app to give them just what they need, and show them where to look for more if they choose. If we continue to inundate them with noise, they will continue to be lost in our digital tools.

Simplicity is Crucial

Members want digital tasks, information, and interactions to be simple, clear, and concise. Members want our digital tools to reduce the complexity of health insurance and make it understandable.

Key Insights

  • Consumers feel that all the responsibility for understanding health insurance is on their shoulders. No one is helping them.

  • Many believe that health insurance companies don’t exist to help members. The lack of simplicity and consumer-friendliness lead to a feeling that the system is rigged.

  • Consumers are not seeing the value of their health insurance. They feel like they are paying for something that they can’t count on when they need it.

  • Consumers feel powerless to plan, and unable to feel confident in their decisions because they don’t have the information that they need.

  • Consumers believe that medical providers are there primarily to help them and that insurance companies are there primarily to make money.

DESIGN JOURNEY AND USER RESPONSE

Designing With Principles

Our design principles reflect what we heard from consumers. We used these to guide our creative process and evaluate designs against. These aren’t meant to be rigid and can evolve as people’s needs change.

Design Principles

FROM CONCEPTS TO PROTOTYPES

Concept A - Key Features:

Ask Me Anything

Use a conversational approach through a free-form search field to determine the user’s need quickly and bring the answer to them

Unify the experience for the member

Take the information that currently exists in separate locations and serve it up in a single location at the time that it’s needed

Know the member better over time

Learn from the questions, answers, and preferences over time to provide the member an ever better, more customized experience

Concept B - Key Features:

Start off on the right foot

Pull in as much data as we can about a new member when they on-board from any available sources we can access as well an optional questionnaire.

Personalized, task based, dashboard

Utilize the information that we have about the member to generate a personalized dashboard that surfaces the information / tasks that are relevant to them.

Quick, understandable answers

Option for more Simplify information to be easily digestible. Offer the option to dig deeper for more information if desired.

Wireframes and Mockups

OVERALL OUTCOMES

  • Secured Full Funding: Gained support and full funding from Regence and Cambia leadership to overhaul and implement a cutting-edge member digital experience! 😃

  • Innovative Partnerships: Partnered with the Cambia Data Sciences team to pilot advanced AI, ML, and NLP technologies within the member experience! 🤖

  • Strong Alliances: Established trusted and lasting inter-departmental and cross-functional alliances across the Cambia/Regence enterprise.