STAT Medical Billing
In 2016, I served as a researcher on a multidisciplinary team of UX designers, business strategists, and healthcare designers at IA Collaborative. In response to a design challenge from the Department of Health and Human Services, we envisioned STAT, a centralized medical planning, billing, and payments platform for people who seek a streamlined, personalized healthcare experience.
Rethinking the billing experience
The current healthcare billing experience is fractured and frustrating for everyone involved. Not only are the bills themselves tough to decipher, the process surrounding medical billing can be opaque and drag on for a long time.
Principles for better billing
Through user interviews and co-design, we developed a blueprint for STAT, a billing platform that follows three important design principles.
-
Deliver timely information
-
Directly reflect the user's healthcare experience
-
Enable improved financial planning
A centralized experience
Users receive a monthly statement from STAT instead of a series of EOBs from insurance companies and bills from various providers. They communicate with a STAT representative to resolve questions they may have about their billing or insurance. Monthly statements contain information about providers, treatments, and insurance payments, ordered by date. Users make their payments once a month using STAT's digital or paper payment services.
STAT's entire ecosystem includes the streamlined billing process, simple payment and planning tools, guided claims and appeals, and transparent provider information. With the STAT system, patients would be confident in their understanding of their healthcare experiences and finances.
Learnings
This project served as a competition submission rather than a client-facing project, but it served as a key lesson in how to design for a complex system with multiple stakeholders. Some of our most interesting conversations weren't about the service itself, but about the barriers to its success in the business of healthcare.
