Time Frame: 10 weeks
During my time working at Elevance Health, I had worked as an experience design intern in the Chief Experience Office (CXO). I had created three deliverables by the end of my employment under the guidance of Hannah Carlan and David Poole.
Medallia is a customer experience company that Elevance Health has partnered with to gather data on customer feedback.
Overall, there were:
I organized the 2000 comments into an affinity map where I focused on three specific categories:
One of the challenges during this task was that many comments had to be left barely addressed. Though there were many grievances over limited coverage, confusing costs, and lack of consistent information, the project I was assigned to covered issues of separate categories. In the grand scheme of things, the insights we found regarding our targeted problems were predicted to improve a large portion of grievances.
Key Insights:
dscout is an insights platform that companies can use to conduct studies on a large scale. dscout is participant-run and helps many companies become more human-centric. One of the downsides of dscout is that skews white, young, and middle class, which should be taken into account for all decisions being made based on this data analysis.
This process was completely focused on one of the categories in the Medallia Verbatim Analysis:
provider tiering. Provider tiering is a concept that is relatively unfamiliar to many consumers in the healthcare field and it was our job to research and find solutions to counter the lack of knowledge of this concept.
Our team had distributed an initial screener that
~2000 people had taken. Out of those 110, were deemed to be eligible for the study. After thoroughly combing through their entries, we had narrowed down 19 people to take an in-depth survey with provider-tiering specific questions and a 5-minute video response.
To organize these responses, I had created an affinity map for all participants and organized their responses into an end-to-end experience framework. We specifically noted their positive points, pain points, and suggestions they had to improve their own experience.
Prior to my internship, the team had already created 3 personas.
To summarize our findings on dscout and our analysis with the affinity map, I had created 3 journey maps for the end-to-end experience of provider tiering for the personas. The information on the journey maps were based on experiences that were reported in the surveys in order to have Elevance Health recognize the survey data in a concise way and in a story-telling method.
As of this time, the work on the individual line of business has been put on hold and I started new work towards a competitive analysis on the find-care process for not only the individual line of business, but I was searching how it functioned enterprise-wide.
“Find Care” involves finding providers and being able to compare them for the consumer’s needs. I focused on three large American healthcare insurance companies for this portion.
The main question I pursued was:
I approached this question in 2 parts:
When exploring the first question, I simulated the process of going to the respective company’s website to find the find-a-provider button. Each competitor had it in a different place and labeled with inconsistent terms across the health insurance space. Some of them were simple to find, others were not.
In order to evaluate the second question, I looked at the simplicity of the provider filtering system. Many competitors had designs that gave consumers to look for very specific providers or to filter through providers by applying intuitive categories towards the list. In some websites, there would be a detailed guide on how to use these tools effectively and resources that guarantee the quality of these providers.
The biggest effect that I had helped with was making the business aware that provider-tiering was abrasive. We also changed Elevance Health’s mindset around the provider-tiering experience. We were able to demonstrate that consumers had a difficult time that the company did not originally expect and that the consumers needed a more explicit strategy. Marketing and communications will change and the shopping communications would be adjusted. Member-facing communications will be updated to provide a clearer explanation.
There will be more explicit sets of materials that will help explain the provider tiering system to the member so they can use it and take advantage of this system. There will be more outcomes from this work but they are currently in progress. The individual line-of-business research is still in its iterative process, especially as implementation of provider-tiering went into several states after I left the intern program. The company will use my research insights further for other issues like pain points in referrals and auto-assigned PCPs. We used this insights to sell the story to the business. This will overall improve the end-to-end consumer experience of the individual line of business.
The insights for the competitive analysis will be used for Elevance Health’s improvement of their own find-care process. The continuation of this research and the later changes to the find care process will ultimately affect the company’s overall consumer experience enterprise-wide.