Account Overview
Optum is a massive global organization of 310,000 employees and annual revenue just shy of 200 billion dollars a year. Owned by UnitedHealth, they consider themselves a “healthcare services provider”. Their explosive growth included aggressively acquiring subsidiary companies to increase their capabilities, but this also led to tremendous Tech and Design inconsistencies in their product ecosystem – a recurring issue they wished to address.
While contracting with Fantasy, I was the primary UX leader on this account, collaborating closely with executive stakeholders at Optum and my agency team, to spearhead all workstreams on this account. Functioning as a “player-coach”, I led small teams of product designers on each of our projects and did some IC work myself.
My primary focus was on innovating and improving user experiences to drive better health outcomes (aka. “help people to be more healthy”) and humanize the product experiences (aka. bring “empathy and kindness” into the products) while aligning with the strategic business objectives of Optum and UnitedHealth.
My contributions included:
- UX Leadership and team management on all projects
- Client partnership and leading daily client meetings
- Facilitating cross-functional collaborative projects
- Advocating Data-Driven Design
- UX strategy, road-mapping, and requirements gathering
- Planning and overseeing user research
- New product design, integrating innovative technologies (ex. AI)
- Redesign and overhaul of existing products
- Overseeing accessibility and inclusive design initiatives
- Design system deployment and updates
- Overseeing Agile projects involving different client teams working on the same product
- Working across tons of timezones – ha
Highlighted Projects
Designing an Advanced Modular “Operating System” to House Optum’s 500+ Digital Tools: I led the development of Optum’s user-centric “Clinical Manager” environment, aimed at streamlining and improving the efficiency of case evaluations and care delivery, ensuring better outcomes and user experiences. More soon…
Pioneering Remote Care Solutions (“Telehealth”): Recognizing the timeliness and growing need for a telehealth capability, Optum sprinted towards this goal, spinning up multiple different internal platform teams, all working at an aggressive Agile cadence. I came into this project and was asked to lead the design and implementation across all platforms and deliver a consistent, intuitive, and fast user experience that would raise completion rates and user satisfaction. More soon…
Deploying and Updating Comprehensive Design System Library: I orchestrated the deployment and governance of a robust Design System Library tailored to Optum’s diverse product ecosystems. This system played a crucial role in ensuring consistency, scalability, and efficiency in our design processes across multiple platforms and products and embraced strenuous Accessibility requirements. More soon…
Creating a Vision for the Patient Profile of the Future, Driven by AI: This was one of the most remarkably ambitious projects I’ve ever been a part of 🙂 Working alongside my Account Director teammate (who was previously a practicing MD!) I led the Design for this groundbreaking proof-of-concept work, incorporating the most innovative technologies available and based on all our data about existing Profile features and surrounding pain points. More…
Account Reflections
Healthcare in America is ridiculously complex. There are tons of players involved – insurance companies, the government, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, etc. – and each one has its own rules, goals, and users. Optum is a massive entity and serves them all.
But on the way to becoming massive, tech and design debt at Optum also grew. Whenever this happens, end-user workflows are inefficient, and if your work involves serving someone else, like a customer or patient, this inefficiency will bleed into that relationship and cause frustration.
Addressing this debt and general process inefficiencies became a big theme throughout all of my work on this account. The projects where we fought hard at the beginning for the time to get a 10,000-foot picture and then share that picture among stakeholders were the ones where we delivered the most value. (“Measure twice” … share the “measurements” with everyone involved… then “cut once.”)
The approach I found most productive was to hustle hard to identify client initiatives that shared identical goals and then to facilitate conversations with my team and client stakeholders, focused on how we could most effectively tackle those goals, avoid the limitations of each business unit, and bring all of the stakeholders from those units along on the journey. Since our most senior client partners were heavily invested in high-level goals (like improving the “patient” experience and overall product UX,) they were very supportive of this more high-level approach. (If I could turn back time, I would have also tried harder to get them to hit pause on individual product owner deadlines while we did this important discovery and alignment work. That would have helped everyone be more big-picture focused and would have made future work more efficient. )
Overall, working on Optum was a fantastic growth experience. It was like getting a masterclass on American healthcare, and it was so fun to work with such passionate and smart people, both at Fantasy and Optum. Also, I consider myself especially lucky to have had the ability to work alongside an MD – the Group Director of Health Innovations at Fantasy- every day! (If you’re working on products in healthcare, having the luxury of a colleague and friend who is an actual doctor is priceless!) And my producer was great as well – Thank you for the shoutout, Lou! 🙂
