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Formulated ​UX Strategy for improving communication between CMS teams and healthcare systems participating in models.
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Created a Job Map to document roles and needs through each phase of model implementation based on internal stakeholder interviews​
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Investigated pain-points by analyzing 250 helpdesk tickets and participant interviews
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Created a UX Roadmap to meet OKRs using Value vs Effort Framework
Methods & Frameworks
Jobs-To-Be-Done, Stakeholder Interviews, Participant Interviews, Artifact Analysis, Opportunity Prioritization Workshop
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Role
Human-centered Design Lead
Context
CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) Innovation center tests changes to Medicare and Medicaid through pilots called Models to improve quality of care and reduce healthcare costs. Each model has an administrative team called the Model Team and several healthcare systems that participate in the pilot called Model Participants. The core model team outsources tasks such as technical implementation, communication, data collection and analysis, etc. to third party organizations. Together, all these teams represent CMS and work with the model participants to implement a model.
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Project Brief
Model participants and teams representing CMS communicate using multiple official and unofficial channels making it difficult to track issues experienced by model participants, called cases. This phenomenon also caused the cases to be re-routed to different teams multiple times, creating redundancies in triaging, and increasing time taken for resolution.
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Journey
The very first road bump to designing a research study was that the process of a model, role of each team member in each phase, or the communication protocols were not documented from a design perspective. All the existing documentation was done by the Development team which made it difficult to conceptualize the problem. So, I began by interviewing subject matter experts and internal stakeholders to understand the objectives for each phase of model implementation to establish a technology-agnostic understanding of the process.
I applied Jobs-To-Be-Done framework to the data from secondary research and five interviews to create a Job map detailing the goals and needs of the model team for each phase of the model. This helped us narrow down the scope for this project by focusing on the model team’s communication needs during two phases of model implementation.
I framed the problem statement based on the scope which led to setting goals for this round of research. At this point in the project, the goals were largely exploratory, not confirmatory because we did not have a good enough understanding of the problem space.​​​
To understand the communication needs and painpoints of the model team, I designed a concurrent research study:
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interview - 6-8 model team members
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artifact analysis - helpdesk tickets​
Analyzing 250 helpdesk tickets helped us understand the common questions asked by the participating healthcare systems, how the tickets were being created and rerouted, and steps taken for resolution.​
Due to this being a concurrent study, we had the advantage of adding on to the interview protocol not just questions we found in previous interviews, but also questions we uncovered from analyzing tickets.
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From the triangulated data, I created a list of design opportunities and structured them in the form of 'How might we' questions. However, to create a research roadmap, we had to distill the design opportunities further into challenges experienced by each role on the model team.
The next challenge I faced is that the conceptual roles were very different from the roles defined on the ticketing system which affected the privileges each role had. Though the responsibilities were not as atomically assigned to job roles in practice, after discussions with the development and business team, we decided to consolidate the model team roles on the ticketing system based on responsibilities to reduce the redundant roles that were created over a period of time causing a lot of confusion. For this, I created user profiles and archetypes for each role on the model team and got them verified by the people in the respective roles (whenever possible) or subject matter experts.
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Based on this understanding, I created a road map for explore the design opportunities further. With the help of the internal teams (development, design, business), I refined the OKRs and the road map using value vs effort framework. Finally, I created a executive summary (goals achieved from this round of research, findings, design opportunities, road map) to present to the external (CMS and other third party) teams.