Healthfirst

Building Healthfirst’s first mobile app while coaching on agile best practices and incorporating design and research into the product development process.  

My Role: Product Design and Research Lead (2019)
Additional Team Members: Scrum Master, Strategist, Business Analyst, Architect, 3 Engineers, Junior UXR

Opportunity

Healthfirst is New York’s largest not-for-profit health insurer, serving primarily Medicaid members (79%) in the NY area (~1.5 million members). Hospitals and physicians are paid based on patient outcomes. Their north star was to “provide industry-leading digital experiences that will improve the health and satisfaction of its members, making them more likely to renew and recommend Healthfirst in their communities.” Our team was brought in to validate there was a need for a mobile app, teach them how to include UX design and research in an agile process, and identify the right feature set for an MVP.

Discovery Research

Speaking with Stakeholders

The goal of our stakeholder interviews were to uncover the most impactful and ambitious ways that Healthfirst can serve its members through a new digital experience. There were 3 major themes that emerged from this research, where we spoke to over 30 stakeholders at Healthfirst across various different departments like Pharmacy, Population Health, and C-Suite executives.

The biggest takeaway from these interviews is Healthfirst is primarily concerned with making sure the digital experience wouldn’t replace the human connection they had worked so hard to cultivate as a company; digitzation needed to elevate it.

Speaking with Members

We ran member workshops to begin to uncover how they view their journey with Healthfirst and where the opportunities and pain points currently are. We structured the groups based on their health plan (Medicare vs. Medicaid) and whether or not they were dealing with what they deemed a “chronic” illness vs. only generally needing to interact with their plan periodically. In total we had 36 members participate across the various groups.

Acting as facilitators for the workshop, we had a linear journey of one’s general interaction with a health plan mapped out and asked members to analyze each step - such as understanding your plan, billing and payments, and staying healthy and well - and speaking about their personal experiences and frustrations along the way.

At the end they were asked to get together in groups and come up with “magic wand” ideas for an app to make interacting with their health plan better, and we prompted them with some ideas that we had to gauge their interest in our initial ideas.

What we found is that the stakeholder view of what the opportunity areas weren’t wrong, but that members view understanding Their Plan as an umbrella to accessing and receiving the care they need. 

Reimagining communication and empowering human touch would need to be inherent qualities of how Healthfirst delivers on any product they create. In addition, reimagining communication and empowering human touch are a part of how these concepts/ideas should be delivered.

Design Jam

A group of about 60 people from Healthfirst and Solstice (my company) came together for a full-day workshop that provided a structured way to ideate around the three major themes and opportunity areas we heard.

Each team was given a worksheet distilling down themes and insights, and then were asked to think of how to solve the pain points with a “now, near, and next” lens. In order to apply some sort of “score” to each idea to help the group align on where to prioritize, we used the RIICE scoring method. I was responsible for working with our broader team - particularly our strategist - to come up with these exercises and present these findings during the day, then act as the facilitator in the smaller groups to complete.

The results of the workshop were to prioritize 3 opportunity areas: Find & Change Your Primary Care Provider (PCP), Find/Access Care, and Wellness Habits.

User Research & Design

We spoke to 15 members over 3 studies with 3 prototypes over the course of 6 weeks.

Our objectives were to understand whether or not our initial concepts began to solve previously identified member pain points, measure how understandable the concepts were, understand what value members would see from the concepts, and identify areas of future opportunity areas.

I was responsible for creating the designs and prototypes and working with our researcher to refine the discussion guides to make sure we were able to clearly define our objectives for each study.

Findings

All three concepts were directionally validated while eliciting two different classes of emotions.

Starting the Roadmap

Based on our findings, we identified the near-term and future state epics, as well as the long term vision for what the app could be. I created a variety of high-fidelity designs (not user-tested) to support both the near and long-term vision to hand to the delivery team that would be breaking these down as a starting point.

This project was my last client engagement before I left Solstice to begin my new role at Zola. And while I didn’t get to see the launch through, the first MVP release was launched in March 2020.