UnitedHealth Group | Optum
Optum, a leading innovation company of UnitedHealth Group, is dedicated to helping people live healthier lives by creating a better health care system for everyone. UnitedHealth Group provides services and solutions for over 5,000 hospitals while integrating with nearly 300 health plans and serving over 126 million consumers.
Senior Designer
UX / UI / Docs
2016
Various projects
In 2014, Optum (headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota) established a small creative team in Seattle, WA. As the first designer hired, I worked on-site with 13 developers and remotely with a group of 10 other design leaders. I was responsible for remotely leading innovation initiatives and defining a wide variety of web and mobile healthcare experiences and business strategy documentation.
Intranet redesign guidelines
To build and maintain a successful intranet, you first have to take the time to understand the level of dedication and resources required to do so. I led the efforts in creating this document to help with the success of UnitedHealth Group's intranet redesign project.
The exercise plan builder
Clinicians requested a way to create and track exercise plans for their patients, indicating if patients completed their exercise plans and to what level of difficulty. Why? To increase patient adherence to medical advice to improve upon a patient's quality of life.
What is adherence?
Adherence is the act of doing what is required by rule or belief. In regards to medicine, it is considered the obedience of the patient to the medical advice given. Most Physical Therapists (PTs) agree that the main reasons why their patients do not adhere to their exercise program are because the patients either don’t have the time or are just overwhelmed.
Top 5 ways to increase adherence:
1. Self-efficacy
2. Therapist-patient alliance
3. Patient education
4. Outcome expectancies
5. Limiting exercises
What is self-efficacy?
Self-efficacy is the extent or strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals. According to a report done by the University of Kansas Medical Center, “The literature demonstrates that self-efficacy is an important factor in increasing adherence, the practicing physical therapy community is not aware of the significance of self-efficacy, and it is presumed that patient adherence is suffering as a result.”
Top 4 ways to increase self-efficacy:
1. Performance accomplishments
2. Vicarious experiences
3. Verbal persuasion
4. Emotional arousal
Wireframes
Unanswered questions
• What are the requirements of the clinicians?
• What are the needs of the patients?
• What is the mental model of the user?
• Will accessibility be required?
• Will localization be required?
• What are all the platforms used?
• Will there be any interactions with wearables?
• Will there be interaction with Apple Health?
Next steps
• Leadership approval
• User research
• Interactive prototype
• Usability testing
• User feedback collection and consolidation
• UI and Visual Design
• Usability testing
• Development redlines and properties
Optum.com
Every business goes through one, a website redesign. The design team spent a few weeks working on various concepts to pitch to leadership; below was the concept I had created.
The Digital Health Network
A web-based application created to help reduce the time medical receptionists spend communicating with, tracking and organizing information of, and scheduling appointments for consumers of healthcare services. Designed to deliver a simple yet intuitive interactively engaging user experience.
Information Services
UnitedHealthcare's Information Services, an employee-facing mobile website designed to help employees find what they need when they need it most. Below are examples of the employee connection concept.
The journey of a roster
Providers post ongoing roster updates to health plans with changes of status, address, billing information, and any new or discontinued providers. Claims can often be delayed or even denied because of incomplete or outdated rosters. However, a provider that manages its roster well can eliminate this source of claim delays and denials.
Project results
It's a challenge to showcase and place measures to work completed during my time with Optum's incubation team. However, being part of the team was an educational experience. Working on a new project every couple of months kept me energized, and the challenges that came with the timeline constraints helped the team to do its best work by focusing our time, energy, and attention on achieving the goal at hand. The most challenging part of being on an incubation team was only taking part in the concept portion of concept-to-completion.
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