Skills Involved
Our Sprint Plan
Expected Business Outcomes
- Combine the experience of many current applications into a unified platform.
- Scale the product experience for future growth.
- Identify the key opportunities for user need and business need according to user research and testing.
- Allow users to work faster and more efficiently during the billing life cycle.
- Help users troubleshoot tasks in their day-to-day workflows.
- Provide universal consistency between look and feel between Quadax apps.
- Help billing specialists and managers manage tasks.
Target Audience Segments
Billing specialists and pre-billing specialists often use the software to perform their daily work at doctor's offices, companies, and hospitals today. Billing supervisors also use the software for managerial and administrative tasks today.
What's the Process for End-Users?
- Billing specialists switch between different apps to perform their work duties today.
- There are a lot of tasks and logic checks
- The Eligibility and claims process can vary depending on the organization and their operational structure, and different teams use the software differently today.
- Volume and speed are prioritized day-to-day because their managers often set high quotas for the daily work they have to finish.
- Data comes from many sources and employees check various places for medical billing.
- Billing specialists prioritize “easy” cases that are not “priority” because they usually can get them done quickly. They rely on certain pieces of data to decide which ones.
What Opportunities Exist?
- The software has a lot of features and ways of doing things because it's used by a lot of different types of clientele.
- It takes a long time to master medical billing concepts and workflows in Quadax.
- Users often need to open different screens, apps, and tabs to perform tasks today.
- Some billing ore pre-billing specialists need to troubleshoot over 80 case records a day to keep up with their quota; as such, they have ways of quickly deciding which work to prioritize and need to move quickly.
- When troubleshooting medical claim and case errors, users often hunt to find the issue.
- When using Quadax software today, the system helps users assist in fixing errors and users rely heavily on it.
- Most teams we spoke with have their managers assign tasks through spreadsheets and emails today.
- When checking insurance eligibility, it's hard to easily scan through the benefits responses from insurance payers.
- Users have a hard time accessing previous eligibility checks in certain cases, and sometimes lose the eligibility checks in progress if they take too long to finish.
- There are opportunities to bring certain pieces of data to top focus for users to help them complete their work.
How Might We Deliver an Improved Experience?
- Visual feedback - give the user some kind of visual confirmation of the results of actions.
- Progressive disclosure - give users only enough information they need to make a basic decision, and provide an option for them to “expand” to see more details if they want to read more.
- Visibility of system status - Show users what the system is doing behind the scenes.
- Match between the system and the real world - This helps reduce the learning curve of applications.
- Design for recognition over recall - Users’ memory is limited and often faulty.
- Plain and conversational language - Using plain language and explaining in lay terms helps users learn complex systems faster because they can read and understand underlying concepts without the “jargon”.
- Make sure forms can be easily scanned and read quickly - It’s best to vertically stack all form fields and labels for quick scanning.
- Chunk and categorize larger forms - For the sake of users understanding the relationship between fields, and understanding what to enter in the fields, it’s best practice to categorize and group form fields into sections that “relate” to each other.
- Provide error messages where they occurred - Providing error messages where the error occurred helps provide a tool for users to troubleshoot the issues they have while filling out forms.
- Give the user help in context of the action they’re taking during the moment they’re taking the action - It’s best to show help messages in the moment and in the place where it’s relevant to the user.
- Give the user a path to completion - During the process of filling out forms, it’s best to give users a clear indication of how many steps they need to take and what exactly they need to enter in order to complete the form.
Key Strategies
Keep Users on the Same Page
User workflows are complex during the billing process; users often need to perform many tasks on different pages in the process of their work. We introduced design patterns to keep users on the same page while allowing them to perform other tasks. Shown above is an example of a user processing an insurance eligibility check and seeing results on the "Case" page (where they manage everything). Users reacted positively to the concept of the side drawer because it allowed them to do all their work without having to open new browser tabs or windows.
System Recommended Actions
We designed features that provide guidance in troubleshooting and completing tasks. This helps users today who have to navigate through the uncertainty of insurance payer results, raw data logs, historical records from other users, and other things while trying to "work the case". The "recommended actions" panel pattern allows Quadax team to configure which specific things they want to support for clients, like whether they want to gve the option to require recommended tasks, allow to skip, and other use cases that would be needed for users.
Meeting Work Quotas
The new version allows managers to assign tasks to users, and users to manage the tasks they have assigned. This is one part of the equation to reducing the time to complete tasks and hit quotas for users. With in-app management, users can more quickly delegate and complete assignments. This table shows a user's assigned tasks and data around them. Users can add notes or change the status of the assigned tasks at any time.
Saving Time and Energy
We learned in research that people often keep multiple tabs open and switch between sections of the app. With the new experience, users edit in-line and take more actions from a single page. This saves them valuable time in their workflow. When users take on hundreds of cases daily, the small amounts of time saving add up to a lot of efficiency.
Taking Quick Action
We learned in research that certain actions, like checking eligibility, take a lot of time and knowledge. Users often had to decide how to do it and where to go outside of the software. We built ways for people to perform complex tasks quickly while getting recommendations from the system that help them learn the process. They save time and get help all in one workflow.
Measuring The Impact
Key Performance Indicators
During unmoderated usability testing we measured time to completion during tasks and asked users to rate how much they think the software they saw would save them time and be easy to learn.
We measured a 6.3 average score for both "easy to learn" and "will save me time".
This uncovered a resistance to change in some users. People who have been used to working in certain apps, even if they were arduous, thought the new workflow would increase time to complete. research is needed to uncover more about the results, and why some users ranked higher than others.
Acceptance Testing
We tested different aspects of the information architecture and UI, and found the following:
- Users preferred vertical tab layout over horizontal tab layout as it was easier to scan alongside tables.
- Users were mixed in their preference to dark mode or light mode.
- Users were mixed in their preference to accordions vs. tab navigation layouts.
- We A/B tested two new versions of the "eligibility checker" tool the client had: a "one-page" vs. a "step-by-step", Users preferred a version of the eligibility checker that had the form and results on one page, vs. the "step-by-step" flow, but said the step-by-step flow would be good for inexperienced users and users who want to double check their work.
What We Learned While Testing the Changes
- The workflows we introduced in the new platform align with current workflows.
- The new designs helped users get to information faster when working on tasks.
- Participants had trouble understanding some of the new concepts we were testing, like a separate "Patients" area.
- Participants appreciated being able to stay on the same page to complete their tasks with the new design patterns we introduced.
- A lot of participants reported this new software wouldn't take long to learn but some seemed hesitant to the changes after using the current software for a long time.
- Participants varied in how they use the software; each person had different preferences about visuals and data.
- Participants said the ability to manage tasks right in the app would save them time.
- Most participants said the new design patterns and workflows would save them time.
- Participants struggled to find some of the data on the Case page.
- Participants appreciated the features we introduced to take quick actions across the system.
- Accordions are useful when users are focusing on one thing at a time.