Optum’s Prism application, also known as Member Profile, brings together information from various clinical sources into a single view. It provides nurses, care coordinators, and others with a comprehensive and easily scannable overview of the member's health, enabling informed healthcare decision-making for that patient.

Initiatives include:

• Integration of new features: requirements gathering, UX groundwork, UI solution, engineering handoff, audit post-implementation

• Conducting informal user input sessions based on low/medium fidelity mock-ups

• Design system gap identification and leading component submission requests

Application Vision

The vision of Prism is to revolutionize patient care by seamlessly connecting critical data from all aspects of the healthcare journey and care teams. By simplifying the user experience of applications clinicians use to make decisions, Prism empowers them to adopt a holistic approach, providing the best possible care for patients.

Pain Points

I led a team of UX Designers to address pain points that users encountered with the legacy hard-to-read and hard-to-understand healthcare applications including:

1. Disjointed view of member data: The old application had separate views for member data, making it difficult for users to get a comprehensive understanding of a member's health history.

2. Switching between different apps: Users had to switch between different apps to find data from unique systems, which was a cumbersome and time-consuming process.

3. Ineffective communication of raw data: The raw data in the old application was presented in a confusing and hard-to-understand format, making it challenging for users to make informed decisions.

4. Outdated technical architecture: The old application had outdated technical architecture that made it difficult to integrate new data sources and maintain data quality.

Competitor Review

Key End Users

It's crucial to design products like Prism with flexibility in mind due to the diverse users, use cases, and integration possibilities with other medical services. By employing a plug-and-play approach that accommodates various user needs, Prism became adaptable to different healthcare scenarios, allowing seamless integration with other systems while providing a personalized experience. This flexibility ensures that the application can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of medical directors, behavioral health specialists, nurses, care coordinators, and other end users, enhancing usability and delivering value across the healthcare ecosystem. Users should be able to customize the data shown within their dashboard to display the most important information to them.

User Input

During user interviews, nurses emphasized the significance of prominently displaying 'admissions, discharges, and transfers' data on the member’s landing page. Their feedback highlighted the critical nature of ADTs, as it helps ensure they don’t miss it. (Admissions, discharges, and transfers (ADTs) refer to the process of admitting patients to a healthcare facility, discharging them from the facility, or transferring them between different care settings.) Obtaining direct feedback from end users through real conversations is invaluable, as it allows us to move beyond assumptions and address actual pain points, resulting in a user-centric design that meets their specific needs and enhances their workflow.

Questions to Consider

• How can we reduce cognitive load for users when viewing the landing page? How can we work with Product Owners to help prioritize what appears on the landing page?

• How do the core use cases of Prism differ for each product implementation (Utilization Management vs. Care Management)? What do these differences mean for the way the page is structured for users?

Topics of Consideration

• Updating color contrasts and removing decorative colored icons to meet accessibility compliance vs. receiving key stakeholder approvals (who requested to ‘make it prettier’)

• Weighing pros and cons of a 2 column vs. 3 column layout

• Deciding if we should maintain datapoint consistency across modules vs. displaying only datapoints that end users find most relevant

• Deciding on rules re: page-level scroll vs. scrollability within each module

Product Ecosystem

Reviews & Feedback in Figjam

Advocating for Users & the UX Process

Leading a team of four UX designers was both challenging and fulfilling since we worked on a product with a tight timeline and immense potential, aiming to combine over 20 capabilities into a scalable solution for various types of end users. Due to the product managers' relative newness to their roles and the established engineering team, both teams needed guidance in effectively collaborating with UX designers.

To address this, I facilitated mini UX workshops within my design team to establish and iterate on our ideal process, subsequently devising a plan for incremental improvements with the product and engineering teams over multiple sprints. Achieving buy-in for this process involved time and collaboration with other UX teams, as we navigated the rapid growth and shifting business priorities, ensuring our focus remained on advocating for our end users.

Proposed UX Process

Process Challenges

1. Requirement Changes: sometimes, as concepts are developed, it uncovers additional complexity or causes a shift in the user or business needs

2. Feedback loop: consistent input on what we’re building from users and SMEs

3. Time for UX groundwork: use case and end user understanding aka UX groundwork (due to the design system - product owners thought we could slap page designers together way more quickly)

4. Time for reviews: UX reviews, accessibility reviews, design system reviews, engineering check-ins, product owner reviews before grooming the topic with the wider UX, product, engineering group

UX Task Tracking

Managing Priorities

Tokens & Theming

The Optum design system leveraged a token system in all products, enabling easy ‘1-click’ swapping of application styles between 2 distinct ‘gold’ and ‘azul’ themes. In the future, the vision is to make Prism available for white-labeling, allowing external companies to acquire rights to the platform and leverage its capabilities. When this happens, the tokenization will become even more important because those external companies will have their own colors, fonts, icons, type styles, spacing increments etc. which Prism will be able to easily update to match.

Leading Design System Contributions

As a top contributor within the Cross-Product Design Committee at Optum, I played a significant role in shaping the organisms and templates that make up a page. Given the company's vast portfolio of over 100 products, I identified common patterns, conducted thorough audits, and then make UI recommendations that would efficiently meet the needs of all products. Examples of my contributions include developing consistent layouts for common components such as the top navigation, side navigation, member banners, filtering, and tables.

Table vs. Card Pattern Usage

Data tables and cards are both popular UI design patterns for displaying information. However, there are pros and cons to each approach, and I helped designers choose the right approach based on the specific needs of their users.

Product Icon Exploration