Providing a more transparent and streamlined link between Health Benefit Coordinators and Health Insurance Providers
A large health insurance provider was facing challenges with providing comprehensive and compelling quarterly and annual employer insights to help with renewal of business. We were approached to conduct a Design Thinking workshop to uncover opportunities for better storytelling through data.
My Role:
Team Lead, User and Market Research, Stakeholder Interviews, Empathy Mapping, Customer Journey Mapping, Design Thinking Workshop Facilitation, Paper Prototyping, Wireframes
In preparation for the workshop, I conducted market research to establish a foundational understanding of the specialized relationship between insurance providers and Employee Health Benefits Coordinators. My research quickly reinforced that there is a significant downstream impact from data-driven decisions - affecting budgetary allocations and overall employee satisfaction with health benefits.
This research also helped provide the necessary background for conducting stakeholder interviews. I was able to talk with three Benefits Coordinators, as well as team members from the client-side responsible for building the reports and keeping the Benefits Coordinators informed.
As the workshop kicked off, I was able to share key challenges and successes echoed through the interviews. Together we identified themes and clustered the insights.
From these learnings, I led the team through a CJM and Empathy Map, which further solidified the team’s empathetic understanding of our Health Benefits Coordinator persona.
Through this process it became clear to the team that the Benefits Coordinator didn’t need a better story as they had originally thought. The What they needed was better data - exactly when they needed it.
With a better-informed point of view, the team redefined the problem statement to ensure it would directly meet the needs of our persona by incorporating our insights.
We believe that (the Benefits Coordinator) receives limited data and insights that are fragmented, untimely, not concise, and not actionable, restricting her ability to effectively and proactively manage costs and employee experience. Delivering the right data at the right time may solve this problem by proactively providing actionable and relevant insights with quantified financial impact.
During the Ideate phase we sourced ideas for approaches to solve the problem motivated by the Empathy Map and the new problem statement. The team was particularly inspired by consideration on how other industries, such as financial services, might approach solving the same problem.
After prioritizing the resulting ideas on an impact-feasibility matrix, the team aligned on features for an MVP to prototype.
A total of 12 screens were identified, and the team worked in sub-teams and cycles to paper prototype 6 of them within by day 2 of the workshop.
I translated the paper prototypes into low-fidelity wireframes and handed them off to an offshore team member for additional visual design.
The next morning when the client team arrived to the workshop, we were able to begin test and validation of the approach with key stakeholders. On this final day of the workshop, we also worked through high-level technical requirements for easy transition to the XD and Analytics team who would build the solution to reality.
This project is currently in production and the client has confirmed very positive feedback from Benefits Coordinators, as well as from their internal stakeholders. Not only does this solution seamlessly link their customers to the data they need on-demand, but it also eliminated the time-consuming and manual process that was previously necessary to provide these insights.
This project contributed to NTT DATA’s recognition as a leader by NelsonHall in 2019.
“After partnering with NTT DATA for many years, this recognition comes as no surprise. At their Collaboration Center in Texas, we leveraged NTT DATA’s extensive design thinking expertise to uncover new insights and gain an in-depth understanding of the problem we were trying to solve. This process accelerated us from a business problem to a high quality design prototype in three days, a process that would have taken weeks otherwise. This was an invaluable process for meeting aggressive delivery goals with fantastic outcomes for both Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and our customers.”
- Vice President of Medical Informatics, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.