Carefirst (Blue Cross Blue Shield) was spending a lot of time and money handling customers submitting claims via mail or calling the help center to figure out how to use the current site to submit claims, handle billing, and get doctor information. Their site was confusing and required far too many steps to get to information, causing most users to bail and rely on traditional methods of communication.
The primary goal for the CareFirst user portal was to push most users to handling all of their healthcare transactions through the site. Everything from claim submitting, bill payments and communications with their primary doctors.
The first step was to gather as much information as possible through user testing, noting all the pain points of the current site, and what a typical user journey flow would be. We did a complete audit of the current site, noting its lack of general functionality.
Empathy Mapping Workshop
Since CareFirst had such a wide demographic, one of the first things we did was create an empathy map. The workshop was a collaborative team effort across multi-functional teams so we could get a better understanding of what customer’s current experience was and begin to plan what work needed to be done.
Journey Mapping
In this example of one user flow, we were fortunate enough to be able to have users come in to perform an audit of the site in-person. We devised specific flows for them to tackle and noted where they had the most difficulty and became the most frustrated
Personas
We then created personas based on the user testing. The insights gathered from the initial user testing aided us in selecting the main personas we would design for, including their pain points with the current site.
CLIENT COMMENTS:
“[CareFirst’s] systems are pretty archaic. They have different systems, one that the employee sees, one that the administrators see, [and] the third system that the actual customer service and claims teams at CareFirst use. All three of those systems talk to each other, but on a very broken and delayed basis. It's not one holistic [system] that auto updates on a regular basis.” –Washington Gas
“I would like them [to] update/modernize their delivery systems… It doesn't feel very nimble. Just make things more customer focused, customer friendly.”
–American University
“We still have issues with getting people enrolled in the proper plans. I guess the interface between Benefitfocusand CareFirst. The data is not correct, enrollments are not correct, changes are not correct.” –St. Mary’s County Commissioners
“We changed from one platform for enrollment to another. That could have gone smoother. Even some of the back-end processes aren't as smooth. We use CareFirst Connect, through Benefitfocus. It would be really nice if it was real time.” –Marymount University
Original Site
New Site
We created a whole new color palette and typography
New Homepage Dashboard
Using the information we had from users. We wanted them to have a personalized experience, and decided a customizable landing page would be the best solution. There users had a quick snapshot of the things they wanted to view the most, with a link to actual page enabling them to dig in further.
Claims was by far the most confusing to the users we tested. Initially it was broken up into separate pages, one for Spending Accounts, one for Deductibles, then Claims current and past. Our solution was to bring everything onto one easily navigatable page since they were all related to each other. Each section is collapsible so you don’t have to look at more things than you want to.
The Outcome
Implementation of the new system was rolled out in phases over a two year period. Phase one includes the most painpoints sited by users. Within the first 4 months site engagement was up by 42% and call center engagement had been cut in half. By 2020 engagement with the My CareFirst user portal was up to 68%