Case Study: Healthcare Provider Public Website Experience
Making it easier for providers to work with payers
The Problem
Interviews with a wide range of commercial healthcare providers* revealed that they found it very difficult to find information they needed on Anthem.com.
This, along with other issues**, was leading to providers’ growing frustration about working with Anthem.
* Providers refers to professionals responsible for the administrative functions of their commercial medical practices, facilities
** Issues included difficult onboarding process, difficulty being paid and getting help with payment issues, conflicts between guidelines and practice, and more
Provider Needs
from anthem.com
Evaluating Anthem in order to make an informed decision
Enrolling and Onboarding with Anthem
Accessing information and resources (eg. policies, forms, guidelines, news, updates)
Finding the right tools to support their practice (eg. demographic updates, pre-certification, submitting claims)
Find the right person to talk to at Anthem
Provider Experience
on anthem.com
Information is difficult to find and very difficult to understand.
Very hard to find where to enroll
Most pages on Anthem.com are long, hard-to-read lists of links
Information about tools is not available or shows up in multiple places and is often incorrect
Very difficult to find contact information and impossible to effectively search for it
The Challenge
Redesign the provider experience
on Anthem.com to support providers’ information needs and accomplish important tasks …
… as part of a larger effort to improve Anthem’s relationship with their providers.
My Role
I led a team of 2 contracted UX designers and a part-time in-house UX content strategist … in partnership with a Product Manager and 2 scrum teams.
As UX Lead my responsibilities included planning, direction, oversight, communication, ensuring team and stakeholder buy-ins, as well as being hands-on with research and design.
Discovery
Understanding the provider experience on Anthem.com
Approach
Providers’ Needs
Leverage prior research that unocovered the issues that brought us here
Interview providers to get to know their needs and pain
as it relates to anthem.com better
Compare Experiences
Take a deep dive into the anthem.com provider website
Review other provider web sites
Context
Meet with the business and IT to understand its goals, any additional concern and possible constraints
What Providers Said
The vast majority of participants reported that the site uses unfamiliar terms and labels. Nearly half communicated - unprompted - that they would prefer the use of simpler, less formal language.
Providers struggled to find key information, saying the site was “too wordy” and “too busy” with too many links that are hard to scan. Nearly all providers said they failed to find needed information at least occasionally.
Providers asked for increased functionality (eg., claims status, pre-auth, etc) … improved search … better integration between the public site (for information) and the Availity platform (for functionality)
What Providers are Saying
“My staff only calls when they
can’t get an answer on line.”
“How often is that?”
“Well … every day.”
“‘Find a Doctor’” seems like it would be for patients instead of doctors. I can’t think of a reason why a provider would need to find a doctor.”
“Having two separate websites is confusing. It’s a big inconvenience to have to pull up two sites to get all of my information.”
“I think I’m on the right path, but it’s going to take some reading to find what I need. I’d rather just pick up the phone and call.”
Rigid page templates - every page is a list or a long block of text
Site organization felt more internal-focused than provider-focused
Content was redundant, outdated and/or
incorrect, also difficult to understand
Issues on anthem.com
Consistency across other provider websites
Information Architecture
Navigation
Highlighting Resources
Messaging
Visual Design
Page Layout
Business Input on Anthem.com
New enrollment experience
Follow brand guidelines
Anthem should look like a single experience, not silos
Interest in making Anthem.com the “front door” vs pointing providers in different directions
(Almost) no one owns or maintains the content
Provider content lives on an unsupported and costly version of Oracle CMS
Provider site uses Google search appliance, which was about to be retired
Focus
Help providers to …
Evaluate and enroll with Anthem
Find key information such as news, updates, policies, forms, guidelines that is relevant, meets their needs and can be found
Determine how to accomplish tasks eg, authorizations, disputing claims
Reach the correct points of contact for their needs
* as well as our internal focus areas - migrate to new CMS and retire the old one, migrate to a new search tool, and establish content ownership and governance
Design
Ideation and Testing
Content
Complete a content inventory
and audit
Determine how to organize main areas of content based on provider needs
Understanding Content
Content organization was explored
and refined with multiple rounds
of participants using online
card sorting and questionnaires.
The result was a strong set
of content groups but many
questions about exactly how
to present it in the site navigation.
Information Architecture
Proposed information architecture was tested through interviews and tree testing.
Navigating the Site
Options were then tested along with rough wireframes with navigation options.
The tests focused on participants accessing key information on both the legacy site and a semi-clickable prototype.
Results showed that while participants could complete their tasks on both sites, they could complete them faster on the new prototype site.
Site Navigation
Content Challenges
Our team conducted outreach for 5 months to find content owners (or potential owners) or teams that supported the type of content that we wanted to present on the site.
Working with our content strategist, the entire team pitched in to draft content to help teams to deliver
Often we were able to establish new content owners, as required by the ART to publish on the CMS (but not always)
Content Transformation
Results and Takeaways
The new provider experience
Provider Responses
“I don’t know how it could get much easier.”
“This page (forms and guides) - the way it’s set up - is excellent, in my opinion.”
“This site is so much easier than some other (payer sites)”
“This was a lot easier than usual.”
Stats
Legacy Site Jan 2018
Monthly Visits: 6,343
Unique Visitors: 5,476
New Site Oct 2018
Monthly Visits: 6,341
Unique Visits: 5,979
New Site Feb 2019
Monthly Visits: 14,960
Unique Visits: 13,517
$2.4 million
The amount of money the company saved retiring the legacy CMS and the old content
Lessons Learned
Provide a more complete roadmap for future versions of the site that better accounts for other needs
Find a way to ensure all content has
a clear owner who is accountable
Push harder to get buy-in from stakeholders on personas
We provided style guides, directions, and templates but once other business units started working on their site migrations, they had their own challenges and deviated from the framework
We took temporary ownership for critical content in order to get it over the finish line. In the end the product team was stuck with managing it
We may have helped the organization to see some of the upcoming obstacles by putting our personas through additional scenarios beyond our project’s scope