Patient Payments
As a lead designer at athenahealth, I was responsible for designing patient payment plan workflows, e-Statement opt-in workflows, redesigning paper statements, and creating vision concepts to support the future of patient payments using the athenahealth platform.
As a result of this work, our teams were able to drive e-Statement adoption and save over $1M annually. At nearly 68%, athenahealth’s patient pay yield numbers are the best in the business.
The Challenge
There were several opportunities to overhaul the entire patient payment experience, in order to drive patient pay yield and top-line revenue to the business. Legacy views were noted as not consumer-grade by clients, and in need of modernization.
High level goals:
Create lower friction payment experiences.
Enhance clarity of information and information architecture on bills to support patient understanding, across touchpoints.
Provide net-new experiences to meet patient payment needs (payment plans).
Drive adoption of e-Statements to reduce operational cost.
Creating lower friction payment experiences
One of my first roles as a lead designer was supporting the implementation of rehauled payment touchpoints for Quickpay, one of the flagship payment workflows for patients. In this project, I served as a scrum designer supporting design QA and ensuring designs were followed to spec. This early project helped me quickly learn the payment design framework and design system we were using that would serve useful on a subsequent project, designing payment plans and payment plan views.
I worked with our design team to support the critique and evolution of these views, and jointly with product to ensure an appropriate v1 scope.
Sample payment plan workflow design, designed in Figma, vetted in usertesting.com.
Enhancing Clarity and Information Heirarchy
I led multiple cross-functional workshops to identify lessons from competitors that we should use in our design.
Following my work supporting payment workflow modernization, I was tasked with redesigning paper statements to:
Meet a top voice of the customer request
Drive alignment with new digital experiences to deliver consistency across digital and physical touchpoints
Speed payment and increase e-Statement adoption
I led a full discovery effort with a cross-functional team of product, operations leadership, vendor partner, clients, and patients, to move toward an ideal state solution that was fully implemented by the vendor.
I created discovery designs in tandem to show, and not just tell, the story of the future and how bills could adapt to meet the needs of patients through information architecture, visuals, and simple language.
These bill designs were built by the vendor in their software under my supervision. Statement designs were de-risked through several rounds of iteration, internal critique, and user testing sessions. The resulting design saves athenahealth $1M annually on paper costs by better-using space and removing static, unused FAQ copy while focusing on the most important need-to-know patient information.
Driving e-Statement Adoption
I partnered with Product to find appropriate moments across payment touchpoints to insert e-Statement sign-up experiences.
e-Statement adoption is another way to reduce costs associated with paper, and our analytics team also confirmed that those enrolled in e-Statements pay 2x faster than paper. As such, it was a business priority to drive adoption.
I designed:
Email campaigns to drive adoption, working with the Messaging team on cadence for this campaign
Self Check-In banners
Portal Billing section banners
Payment workflow opt-in moments
As a result of these designs and implementation, we continue to see improved e-Statement opt-in numbers each year.
Payments Vision
Our VP of Design often asked our team to push the limits of what could be done to expand our service offerings and deliver more for patients. I was often lauded for my work doing so.
One of my strengths is my ability to quickly create vision prototypes and tie them to user narratives to make them easy to understand. I typically package these concepts so they are easy to share across the organization. I add them to standalone prototypes and place them within decks. As a result of this work, I’ve helped to evolve discussions within our zone around the future of supporting patient payment. Here are several examples of this style of work.
athena FSA - a smart FSA account connected to care.
Using AI to help patients estimate costs before services are rendered.
Social pay integration to help patients more easily pay their balances.
Leveraging the athena network for referrals and cost comparison shopping.