Flexipay

There are many issues with the American healthcare system. One of those is that many people are unable to meet out-of-pocket costs for their care, or risk going severely into debt by doing so.

Digging deeper into this - private healthcare providers are often at a loss when it comes to collecting out-of-pocket expenses:

The Visa Garage team identified this as not only an opportunity to disrupt the healthcare payments solutions market, but also provide patients with a new way to pay that won’t be cause for hesitation in pursuing that care.

Addressable market and monetization strategy would get us to a break-even point within five years, and eight figure revenue within ten (assuming clear skies) - as the leading way to pay, and be paid, in healthcare.

By combining flexible payment methods, accessible embedded lending options, and healthcare technology systems integration - patients are enabled to pay in the way that makes the most sense for them, while medical providers get paid up front.

More ways to pay, more room for care.

When I joined the Garage team, the project was still in an early phase in terms of solution architecture. The goal was to launch our initial MVP with a pilot cohort of private medical providers sometime in the following 9 months.

Kept separate and confidential from the outside world (including the rest of Visa), the Garage team was able to achieve this goal through intense daily collaboration between our business analysts, designers, researchers, product managers, go-to-market, and engineering teams.

The role of design was to help define product strategy based on a collective understanding of the problem space (which meant co-creating product requirements themselves), based on continuous research and insights with UXR at the center of everything we did.

As the primary design IC delivering all our product design output, I partnered closely with a design director counterpart to fully meet the design team's operational and collaborative commitments.

Over the course of those nine months, our MVP solution took the form of a two-sided web application with experience architectures for medical providers and patients.

On the provider side, medical practices would set up a dashboard to manage their own team users, practice patients, patient billing, receipt of payments from both patients directly and patient-selected lenders, and bill management features to track payment status at individual and trend levels, as well as integrations with their selected EHR and RCM vendors.

On the consumer side, patients would be able to receive bill payment invites directly through a dashboard where they could manage how they paid, interactions with lending options, and payments progress.

It became clear early on that the complexity of orchestrating data from healthcare integrations, a lending marketplace, individual financial data, and business data into a cohesive payments product would become overwhelming in the absence of structured process. Little details falling through the cracks could be very risky.

Notably, HIPAA privacy and financial consent standards had looming influence over all of our product design decisions.

We discovered that in order to reduce friction in our design process, it would be critical that we set up a structured process to co-author our product requirements. This ended up reducing collisions between functions when it came to feature prioritization, as well as reducing the number of design cycles per sprint to reach the best possible outcome.

Once we got into a good rhythm of collaboration for defining product requirements across both provider and patient experiences, it became a lot smoother for us to visualize user journey flows while maintaining alignment with our target requirements.

This was one of the best teams that I've ever had the opportunity to work with, and learn from. Each person brought their own inspiring standard of excellence to the table, day-in, day-out.

This project was really special in that it’s just one of those rare times where product development properly prioritizes, and enables, research to show up in its best possible form.

With everybody along for the ride, they were able to set up regular user testing sessions to evaluate our hypotheses every step of the way, as well as various in person workshops and field trips to do ethnographic research.

My humble contribution here throughout the project included writing design research protocols and facilitating user testing for ten patient and medical office interviews, supported an in-person co-creation workshop with about 15 patient personas, and accompanying research and product colleagues to medical offices for interviews.

After each research activity, the teams got together to discuss what we had learned. While interpretation was a joint-effort between design, research, and product - our research partners kept us honest if things ever started to seem murky.

Most of what we learned led to some form of tactical design update - but there were always at least one or two things worth considering that would potentially impact our overall product strategy (and even business model). On a few occasions we -probably avoided some hefty debt down the line just by nature of how everyone enthusiastically participated in these post-research sessions with Insights and Design.

As we started to reach the tail-end of our concept testing phase, users were providing overwhelmingly (almost heart-stirring) positive feedback. One of the coolest feelings ever was realizing that one of our patient participants was more interested in what we were building than we were.

In one instance, after a thorough in-office research session with one of our pilot medical providers, we learned some pretty interesting things about their consent requirements.

While we had to completely re-think some aspects of a pretty critical user flow, ultimately it saved us a lot of time and heartache we would’ve had to endure post-launch.

This was one of the best products I have had the opportunity of working on. It was chunky in terms of product design complexity, validated by user and market research, would have had a positive impact on the lives of American medical patients and their medical providers.

The massive addressable market and monetization strategy for this would see potential a investment break-even point within two years, and eight figure revenue in the first five (assuming clear skies) - as the leading way to pay, and be paid, in healthcare.