Healthcare Management Administrators (HMA) is a leading third-party benefits administrator that is focused on making healthcare more affordable and easy to understand for employers and their employees.
HMA is known for their ability to customize self-funded benefit plans for employers, enabling those employers to create unique plan offerings for their employees. Managing these custom plans for multiple employers and their thousands of employees is very complicated.
Providing members with health plan options, services and a digital experience that match market expectations and rivals those of the National Carriers is a standard that HMA strives for. And having an intuitive, user-friendly Member Portal that can be easily accessed on mobile, tablet and desktop devices is a critical requirement to meet today’s consumer expectations.
HMA’s legacy Member Portal and Mobile App were reliant on 3rd-party solutions that limited their ability to control the customer experience. They had a relatively small IT organization that had not built a digital product from the ground up.
We applied Design Thinking to create an intuitive Member Experience as well as streamlined employee experience for HMA’s operations, customer support and claims management.
Modernized architecture and technical capabilities that position HMA for growth and changes in the Healthcare payer landscape. Extensible design system that provides HMA with a blueprint for creating future experiences.
So, redesigning their Member Portal and Mobile Apps to match the level of care that their members have come to expect when interacting with HMA’s team was a key objective for this initiative.
But, this was more than simply redesigning the user interface.
Prior to engaging UpTop Health, HMA’s product team had compiled a list of almost 100 requirements that their new Member Portal would need to meet.
HMA had to make some critical decisions:
The existing Member Portal was built on a 3rd party portal solution in which HMA had very little control over the user experience. As concierge services have been added, there was no elegant way of incorporating them into the information architecture, navigation or user flow.
Legacy systems, architecture and processes needed to be assessed and in some cases replaced. But doing this within the constraints of budget and timeframes, was something that needed to be carefully considered.
HMA made the bold decision to build and to invest in the future, and that’s where UpTop entered the picture.
“We had made the decision to build a portal for our members and an accompanying mobile app. We have a relatively small IT org and I knew we didn’t have the number or right mix of skills to execute on that project successfully. I had the benefit of working with UpTop previously and I felt confident that you would be able to help us fill that skill and expertise void.”
UpTop was initially brought in to envision and design the new Member Portal and throughout the UX design process we worked closely with the Business and IT stakeholders to align on the vision for the product. This was the first time HMA would build a digital product from the ground up, so the design process was new to many on their team. To gain alignment on the product vision and build confidence among the project leadership team, we leveraged working sessions, prototypes and insights from lean user research.
As with any digital project, designing the experience with the user needs, business objectives and technical constraints in mind are the charter for the UX team. Bringing our outside-in perspective allowed for the HMA project team to have vigorous discussions about the product vision and design, and to prioritize requirements and features for their product roadmap.
During the UX design phase, HMA shared that they needed to add technical leadership and skills to the project team to meet their objectives, so we expanded our team to provide leadership and execution of technical architecture, backend development, frontend development, mobile app development, and DevOps.
We worked along-side HMA’s team to architect and build the backend systems and services, web applications, iOS and Android mobile apps, and stand up the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service that are the foundation of HMA’s new Member Portal and Mobile Apps.
HMA invested the time to understand their Members and build an experience that makes managing their health easier by providing the right information, at the right time and in the right context.
In addition to the Member facing experience, the platform integrates backend systems and services to streamline operations, customer support and claims management.
Areas of Focus
An ideation/envisioning workshop will help bring clarity to your idea and align everyone behind a common goal and vision. UpTop Health will lead your team through exercises that will help build empathy with users, ideate on solutions, and envision the experience through prototyping.
Our Solution Architects will help you engineer the specific solution you require by auditing as much of your enterprise system that directly applies, then crafting the architectural strategy necessary to achieve your business goal.
Patients and Payer Members expect the same level of convenience and availability as they get from their banks, e-commerce and travel providers. UpTop Health will help you build modern, fast and durable customer experiences on the web and mobile platforms.
More than a half of all internet traffic is mobile. Your customers are expecting an app-specific experience. UpTop Health will help you identify relevant mobile services and implement them in a state-of-the art app.
In the healthcare space it’s next to impossible to build anything without consuming or offering information through APIs. We will help you integrate or create custom APIs that will remove friction in your data flow.
We do not fear your legacy system and there is no reason you should either. We have vast experience helping companies connect their older systems to viable solutions, adding functionality, longevity and improving the overall user experience.
