The healthcare sector, particularly pharmacy benefits, is notoriously complex. This complexity carries over to the digital tools provided by Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), which are often outdated and difficult for patients to use.
This project reimagined the SmithRx legacy Member Portal (pictured below, left) to align with company values by empowering members through intuitive, low-cost, tech-forward solutions.
Company
SmithRx
Year
2024
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
Design systems, cross-org collaboration, stakeholder management
Our goal was to disrupt an outdated industry by empowering members with an accessible, self-service experience and easy-to-understand content.
We hypothesized that providing members with an intuitive and educational experience would improve business efficiency by reducing support call volume while increasing customer satisfaction.
Cross-organizational collaboration was essential to our discovery and development process, bringing together diverse perspectives and aligning different areas of expertise.
We methodically focused on building data-informed features that mattered most to our members.
The design and prioritization of key features were guided by analyzing the most common Member Support Services (MSS) call types and case categories. The launch of Ember included three major features that required extensive cross-organizational collaboration: Prior Authorization (PA) status update notifications, Find My Meds (a location-based drug cost search tool), and recent Prescription tracking and details.
“If we can’t give them control, we can give them transparency.” - Project stakeholder
Ember has been instrumental in transforming how patients interact with SmithRx's healthcare services. While industry-wide constraints limit our control over our members' end-to-end journeys, these limitations have strengthened our commitment to transparency and member empowerment. As a result, we've seen a significant increase in monthly active users and a substantial reduction in support calls for key categories like Prior Authorizations.
Key Project Learnings
1. Complexity in Simplicity By maintaining relentless curiosity, we gained a thorough understanding of complex problems—which ultimately led us to elegant, simple solutions. 2. Collaborative Diversity Diverse perspectives minimize oversights and improve solutions. Discovery calls were my favorite part of this project because I always learned something I didn’t expect to, simply by gathering diverse thinkers into a single space and asking open-ended questions.
Credits
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