Independent Blue Cross
Role — Interaction & Service Design Lead
The Client: IBC, the leading insurance provider, serving three million in the Philadelphia region.
IBC employs a third-party service called NaviNet as their official provider portal (a secure web portal where the healthcare providers look up all insurance-related info such as patient info, eligibility, submit claims, benefits, and policy details). NaviNet is America’s leading healthcare provider portal connecting over 40 health plans and 60% of the nation’s physicians.
The Goal: IBC wants to launch its own in-house provider portal.
The Ask: To think of portal as a product. To define opportunities, create the future vision, and design experience concepts.
How might IBC deliver an exceptional service experience and vendor interaction to its providers?
Five Weeks of Research yielded a deep understanding of the portal – the problems between insurance and providers as illustrated below. *
*Research documentation is confidential and proprietary, not shared in full detail here.
Key research insights
Getting information is a needle in a haystack exercise
Sending broad guidance to everyone means it reaches no one, leading to issues down the road.
Minor issues become a needlessly large snowballing problem
Small mistakes, like the misspelling of a name or the wrong ID number, can lead to months of headache.
No one to just tell me what’s going on or what to do
A lack of feedback and updates makes users confused throughout the process and leaves them frustrated.
Conclusion — A cycle of non-resolution in the customer interaction journey escalated issues. Here’s how.
Solution goal — To deliver a well-designed portal that is supported by a robust service experience.
One that enables greater efficiency and stronger provider relationships in the short term, while paving the way for the creation of new business value.
We designed nine experience concepts across the customer journey
Laying out the user interactions with the product, the insurance provider portal.
The denouement of the complexity of the product is solving for “Experience Centrality.”
We crafted design principles to guide us through the solutions.
Concept 01 — Onboarding
Onboarding is critical to ensuring effective provider engagement. Key steps to successful onboarding:
Treat all users as ‘new’
A successful in-portal tutorial educates users from scratch – instead of comparing old to new, it presents intuitive avenues for completing common interactions.
Collect information
To personalize the portal for individual users, they will need to create singular profiles nested under their provider-level account. This is an opportunity to collect the information necessary.
Continuously ‘onboard’
Given the complexity of the provider portal, users will need to be given the opportunity to seek out information in a continuous way.
Concept 02 — Home
Home provides direct access to the tools and information providers need most, including member search, frequent transactions, and open submission statuses. Prioritizing these aspects of the digital experience lets providers spend less time on redundancy and more time serving members.
Lots of noise, little efficiency.
Currently, providers have no actions that they regularly use on their home page. In addition, they spend countless hours redundantly entering information that could be auto-populated.
•How might we allow users to customize their experience to align with their workflow?
•How might we empower users by giving them the resources they need to do tasks faster?
Final words — “Ease of Implementation”
IBC is faced with a multiplicity of priorities, most centrally the technical and operational readiness of the provider portal. Given this playing field, IBC should consider the technical, process, and people changes required for implementation with an eye towards building a foundation concept implementation over time.
Ownership & Flexibility of Action
Technical Difficulty and Implementation blocks
Cost & Timeline
The concepts were well received. They are in the process of being deployed.