Background

NCQA • 2015

National Council for Quality Assurance (NCQA) participated in a webinar where I presented on understanding your audiences and building things they'll actually use. They contacted me and the Forum One headquarters during my presentation to ask us to bid on this project. They were sold!

Problem

It's required.

Medical practices are often required to gain Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH) Recognition from NCQA. This requirement may be dictated by the federal government, state governments, or others.

It's long.

The PCMH Recognition process can take a practice 8-12 months to complete! In that time they must "transform" their practice to meet the standards. They then have to prove that their practice has transformed and submit proof to NCQA. It's not an easy task.

It's detailed.

In the current process, practices were required to create 2 different accounts, interact with 2 systems, and submit over 100 documents.

It has many audiences.

This long, complex process involved many people, but internally at NCQA, and externally. And, as always, many of these audiences had very different needs and tasks, but they were all vital to moving the process along.

It needed to be redesigned.

NCQA had received many complaints over the years about the clunky PCMH Recognition system. There were other companies who built systems with better UX. Practices were hiring consultants just to get them through NCQA's process. NCQA had created a large team to redesign the business processes and needed a UX partner to reflect and improve them online.

Key Goals

Craft a user experience the reduces user stress, time, and frustration.
Redesign the recognition process (a multi-step, multi-month process) to reflect new business processes.
Identify and suggest improvements for business processes.
Increase the number of practices who are PCMH recognized.

Activities

The new PCMH Recognition system we envisioned included elements from a variety of systems. It needed task tracking, messaging, surveys, mapping to rules and regulations, document sharing, and much more.

On this project, I did the following:

Lead strategy sessions and workshops with senior leadership.
Mentored a junior user experience designer.
Conducted audience analysis, including surveys, interviews, personas, journey maps, and user flows.
Created information architecture and site maps, while working closely with the NCQA development team, program team, and senior leadership.
Coordinated with visual designers as design concepts were created and presented.
Conducted usability testing, presented findings, and refined information architecture and designs.

Outcome

2015 - We completed our UX work. NCQA is developing this tool. It's still in development.