Brian Lam • Product Designer

+Akira Health

In adherence to my non-disclosure agreement, I have excluded and obscured confidential information within this case study. The content presented here is solely my own and may not necessarily align with the perspectives of 1Password.

+Akira Health is a client management portal that makes overseeing operations of large and complex client portfolios, corporate account creation, and managing eligibility claims status fast and simple for account managers and their team.

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+Akira Health

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+Akira Health

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Context

In the recent partnership with leading healthcare providers and clinics across Canada, the current experience for creating separate corporate accounts, checking eligibility, and managing a massive amount of data for clients is very manual and unreliable.

Account managers handles most of their account management and client services task through various external tools. This leads to unnecessary steps for them because they cannot focus on getting new customers to maintain the financial relationship throughout the customer lifecycle. On the other hand, service professionals need to get a complete view of a corporate account, including transactional history, client information, and all other service. Service professionals tend to forget to update client information and it becomes outdated. All of these complex tasks can be automated with +Akira Health.

Involvement

My role as the Lead Product Designer contributed to leading the end-to-end, 0 to 1 design, research & strategy, and delivery of +Akira Health and all of the account management features. I also collaborated with the Product Owner to arm account managers and multiple teams with the right training on a regular cadence until they have successfully incorporated +Akira Health into their workflows.

Goals

Increase the number of account managers and members of their team to use +Akira Health and adopt account management features.
Reduce costs of external services and current expenses.
Increase client verification and enrolment into Akira Health services.
Deliver 5+ major account management features within 4 months.

Increase the number of account managers and members of their team to use +Akira Health and adopt account management features.
Reduce costs of external services and current expenses.
Increase client verification and enrolment into Akira Health services.
Deliver 5+ major account management features within 4 months.

Core Responsibilities

User Experience Design (UX), User Research, A/B Testing, Prototyping, co-created the Product Requirements Document (PRD), Designed, organized, and facilitated each round of testing, and presented project updates and research insights through knowledge-sharing workshops.

Team

Product Designer (Me), Chief Technology Officer, Product Owner, Engineers, and Director of Marketing.

Led discovery in uncovering current user problems

The current state of account management is done manually, resulting in employees and account managers to be misaligned. Akira Health wanted a way to make it easier for account managers and the teams that they lead to have a streamlined account management solution to make a meaningful and critical business decisions confidently (a source of truth that teams alike can and access to data that is complete, accurate, and high-quality).

How might we increase confidence in account managers to use +Akira Health so that they have visibility into insights to build engagement and manage member retention?

How might we present data more meaningfully to help account managers and coordinators consistently easily monitor and measure account performance and at the same time quickly evaluate account engagement to prevent eligible customers from getting discarded in the process of enrolment?

Making sure that our UX strategy is also a business strategy

Akira Health’s primary objective during their expansion is to provide partnered healthcare organizations with real-time insights that their teams can leverage to make their organizations more productive, keep corporate accounts continuously updated with customer data as they enrol new ones, and automate operations to make smarter decisions for the business.

Interacting with external tools is a nightmare and it’s time consuming

Because Akira Health works with healthcare clinics, they use Microsoft 365 and a selection of external tools to manage users. Uploading and maintaining a multitude of information from different spreadsheets and documents is by far the largest pain point expressed among account managers and their partners.

Inefficient methods of managing access level in roles and permissions creates bottlenecks in our workflow

Many healthcare organizations require different capabilities and access level for their own account. Each person has administrative roles or responsibilities to perform a specific function. Because there are no way of granting or limiting people access to data in a corporate account, account managers can accidentally make mistakes sharing manually as you cannot revert information that a person shouldn’t have access to.

User management the manual way is decentralized and complicated

Bulk importing and adding users at Akira Health is not standardized across the business. This results in slower inefficiencies for account managers to get eligible clients enrolled on time. Employing traditional techniques hinders admin workload and makes data decrease in reliability as it needs to be updated constantly.

Lack visibility into aggregated data and cannot take action of important events before they impact operations in their organization

Teams are not able to track and monitor service usage, how many clients have been enrolled, how many clients are engaged or disengaged and other performance to ensure things run smoothly. This makes it challenging for account managers and employees to respond to consumer pain-points and provide a less complicated experience enrolling clients to Akira Health services.

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Research helped identify our personas, along with opportunities to communicate findings with stakeholders

I performed 20+ discovery research interviews with account managers and client services coordinators to identify their current process of enrolment, major pain points they need to overcome with the aim of driving effective account management, and define critical feature needs to help. This research contributed to using appropriate collaboration methods involve stakeholders at a higher level to ensure they could provide their input on the product strategy, solidifying Chief of Technology (CTO) and Head of Growth to buy-in on the project and update them on the progress, and to build trust throughout all phases of the design process.

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Defined clear project scopes to prevent project requirements from ballooning

Before designing a 0–1 product, I collaborated with the product owner to co-create a product roadmap outlining product functionalities that align with the organizations long-term goals, laying the ground for when new features will be released, as well as clear definition of the requirements and design/development efforts accounted for.

I collected insights from the user activation and engagement division, the partnership support team, the sales team, and the leadership team. Due to the scope of the project, and the need to get this product shipped quickly, we needed to turn down some product features over others. A prioritization frameworks was used to evaluate ideas on various business parameters without having to rely on gut feelings.

After gaining common perspective and alignment with stakeholders, the Product Owner and I mapped out the ideas that everyone have all agreed to commit to in the product roadmap, then break down those features into epics, requirements, and user stories. We now have a roadmap that shows clear priorities that we could build and maintain if plan changes and allow us to make sense of the features, coupled with their metrics to score specific features that could potentially deliver the most impact for users moving into the design exploration phase.

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Managing realistic timelines and setting up effective MVPs

While there are many opportunities to explore, time wasn’t on our side. We don’t have the bandwidth or systems in place to build every feature, so we needed to work quickly with an MVP mindset to allow the team and employees at Akira Health to benefit from this partnership (account managers and employees in their sales department can manage multiple organization’s at scale and be in more control of the customer engagement and sales process).

To ensure that the design solution was as lean as possible while working with limited bandwidth and tight deadlines, we decided to deprioritize key experiences and features on account coordinator side for Q3 and focus on the account manager experience as it is a core need for Akira Health to scale the business.

Here is why it makes sense to work only on the core features for account managers:

Pros

Easily add, invite, and remove users in a single org or multiple organization’s

Track business performance and monitor progress (members enrolled, total enrolment completed, retrieve visualization at a glance on engagement and usage, and more) in a timely manner.

Easily import users and flag duplicates at creation based on an organization’s account number.

Facilitate eligibility checks to validate if clients are eligible for the service or not.

Account managers will also have the ability to set permissions and restrictions for members in their own organization.

Assign new users to seats (if seats are available) and reassign seats (from one user to another).

Cons

This solution will only work for account managers. Account coordinators will have a different experience and won’t be able to confirm client eligibility at this time as the back-end infrastructure is temporary of managers. Account coordinators can only view and search users in a organization that they manage (search by name, email address, user id, employee number, and company account number). They will encounter a broken experience if they tried to import users.

This experience isn’t the greatest as account coordinators will lose the capabilities of assigning new users to seats or managing seats on the organizational level. This could be confusing and frustrating for account coordinators because they'll be able to view details on seatings, but won't be able to assign people to available seats or unassign them.

Account coordinators won’t have the capabilities of verifying a clients eligibility (confirm or decline). They can only view the clients status and access to a patients information, including claims and transaction history.

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Creating the end-to-end information architecture for account management

I created and proposed an information architecture of the account management experience for account managers that encompassed all of the MVP solutions our product team could build with the technical, time constraint, and other considerations accounted for. I worked with my product manager, the engineering team, and a multitude of stockholders to review/iterate the architecture for account coordinators so that we a clear idea of what features are important to account coordinators and does it solve all of the problems that we’ve found in research.

When we implement this in the next quarter, we would have alignment on the milestones for release and know additional features that we have planned for account coordinators for post-MVP.

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Measuring and validating the design through A/B testing

I conducted research, facilitated A/B testing sessions, and collaborated cross-functionally with the product owner and involved other stakeholders to test the account management features. We need to gather more data around account management to validate our hypotheses and to identify pain points and uncover areas for improvements. I ran this test using a prototype I developed in Figma to compare the performance of a feature with another variation to see their performance better and confidently make optimizations based on real data rather than relying on unproven opinions and hypothesis.

For account managers and account coordinators, this will be a rather new experience for them and a large hurdle for them to overcome because the ideal business goals is to replace a suite of applications that they’ve been so familiar with and slowly nudge multiple teams and departments in the adoption of this application.

Add clients individually and bulk import

Evaluate if account managers know how to add one individual client into the system and then test if they can proficiently import a large number of clients accounts by importing them from a spreadsheet or CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. I also want to see what data should be displayed in both a graph and table format after importing is complete.

Eligibility check clients

Evaluate how account managers find the option to start eligibility check and automate insurance eligibility check to ensure that clients insurance is still valid. I also want to understand if account managers can determine what services are covered for a client and the level of coverage that are available to them. And lastly, I will ask account managers to identify which client is verified and which ones are denied of service.

View insights and reports

Evaluate if account managers understand the metrics and visual reports shown to them in the dashboard. In additional to that, I want to assess the account managers level of difficulty setting up configuration to view granular data, if they can track fluctuations in user engagement, and can they switch between specific views or action in the dashboard to gain insights into user behaviours and patterns in a series of days, weeks, or months.

Add, edit, and delete seats

Evaluate how account managers assign new users to seats if they’re available and re-allocate them as needed. I also want to test if account managers are aware of the differences between revoking and removing clients. (Revoking a client will terminate active sessions of a seat, while on the other hand, removing a client will end their active session and free up one seat from their corporate account).

Organization creation

Evaluate if account managers know how to create a new organization and go through the entire process of configuring policies for it. I also want to observe in real-time if they can locate the button to trigger organization creation. And if the action proved to be difficult to find, how could we change this workflow to help account managers orchestrate this job.

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Deliver an optimized user experience with user feedback in the picture

For the MVP solution, I designed all the account management pages and introduced core account features such as organization creation and connecting multiple organizations, a bulk user importer to import new users, update existing users, or both, eligibility verification, and the ability to monitor or create reports to help account managers with their decision-making process—and to easily understand usage and relay that information to relevant stakeholders on the team.

I learned from prior A/B testing that some of the functions within the account management system caused user confusion and frustration. Something as simple as running an eligibility verification check had resulted in error messages that doesn’t tell account managers what had happened and if there recommended fixes to resolve it. I asked users to complete other account management related experiments and uncovered additional findings that I later created tickets for to address in the refinement stage of the project.

Insight 01

Account managers need to be able to see some sort of visualization in the ‘Eligibility Check’ page to analyze specific clients that were successfully enrolled and those who were declined from enrolment (why the analytics are showing what they are). We need to use the relevant type of visualization to help account managers make sense of the information and what is happening at each point of import.

Insight 02

Account managers stressed that the experience for eligibility verification needs to ‘be more difficult’. It is crucial for users to include the insurance policy number and other pieces of information to start an eligibility check.

To put it in a nutshell, eligibility checks is not suppose to be an easy task because account managers must verify if the client policy is active and that they have the correct details, understand what information to collect from clients at the time of service, look up if the client requires prior authorization before Akira Health will cover their costs, and other information that is of significance to their enrolment. Some friction need to be added without diminishing the experience.

Insight 03

While account managers found that it was nice to see data populated into the ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Analytics’ page, it was also difficult to manually correlate relevant information from the the widgets or graph data. In addition, teams often lack a comprehensive view into all their performance data and context around metrics that are specific to the business or organization.

Account managers liked the end-to-end visibility into the real-time activity, but felt that it lacked detailed information about the metric, what does the number even mean, and is it important enough for account managers to investigate it further to diagnosis the problem. Users want to be able to quickly determine how each metric or event was captured and what it represents.

Check out the prototype

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Bulk import data to speed up client enrolment

Because account managers frequently manage complex data and at the same time add or update a large number of users, they also needed a way to keep track of who gets enrolled, who was revoked from enrolment, and what changes were made when.

Account managers can add users individually, import multiple users, and modify and update the existing user details. Features like batch deduplication lets account managers identify and resolve duplicates within the imported batch. In the ‘Import Process Mode’, they preview the information, such as the number of duplicates, incorrect attributes in the batch data, the number of records that will be updated before the data is actually imported.

Accurately perform the eligibility check

Eligibility check allows account managers to verify a clients and potential customers insurance coverage both prior to and post admission. Members profiles also provides integrated access to insurance coverage information, the members status, contact information, start and end dates, and claims specific to the member.

This feature enables Account Manager's to accurately and reliably evaluate the client information and ensures that the client has the adequate insurance coverage before providing the services. Account managers could also set how often to run eligibility verification check so that it it automatically re-verifies insurance eligibility for all active intakes and clients.

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Data-driven insights and engagement reports

Akira Health had been relying on a combination of apps to manage their business operations. None of those apps were integrated tightly enough for the Sales Team to analyze large volumes of data to improve client outcomes and operational efficiency.

The newly integrated data management feature enables stakeholders to gain a holistic view of client interactions and behaviours with Akira Health services, uncovering actionable insights to drive and improve patient care. Account managers can easily monitor data that includes: number of enrolled members, number of users who have completed registration, engagement for each type of service, and more.

Confidently and quickly manage seats

Seat management allows account managers to determine the level of access clients have to a subscription service. Akira Health offers different types of seats based on the subscription services the client has purchased or covered by their insurance.

Account managers can add or remove paid seats or change the number of available seats that can be assigned to clients and could manage upgrade or downgrade requests.

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Create an organization

The account management portal allows account managers to quickly create a new organization, add prospects and customers to the organization, and change someone's access and permissions to a portfolio, and more.

This allows account managers to do more self-service account management and manage the financial information for each business portfolio. Among other things, an account manager can add more security to ensure the right internal users have access to for them to do their work and to limit data access for those who shouldn’t be able to see it.

Impact

+Akira Health has shown impressive results since its launch. We saw success in the number of clients enrolled, efficiency in operations related to account management, and a robust data system infrastructure that improves data fidelity that supports account managers in gauging with prospects to become customers.

Overall, +Akira Health has proven to be a valuable product for account managers at Akira Health who were looking for effective account management solutions to effectively manage and utilize data, aligning it with business objectives and addressing data-related challenges in their day-to-day work. Getting the right information to the right person at the right time to achieve desired business outcomes was something we were able to fulfill in 6-months. Our team’s dedication to ship quickly, meet scalability demands, and fulfil customer needs has proved itself in bringing success to the company’s growth and positioned Akira Health as a trusted partners in healthcare services.

85%

Employees incorporated the feature into their workflow

Major account management feature releases

1.0M+

Customers enrolled into Akira Health services

95%

Reduce the cost of using external tools

Retrospective

Collaborating with various teams, especially with Sales and Marketing for 6 months was a great learning experience in project management. I learned how to determine different business cases, created a detailed plan of the tasks required to meet milestones and deadlines, and how to define the scope of the project to prevent feature creep. We were overconfident or rather overestimated at first how long things will take to build. Feature creep was inevitable and can’t be eliminated entirely, but I learned how to communicate with stakeholders and go through the impact of any proposed changes and evaluating the necessity and value of the addition of features with them to minimize it.

Having a clear vision of the account management experience and a clear path to get there was core to our success. While we kept the launch lean and simple, there are functionalities that our team is excited to release that would tremendously help the team manage different aspects orf the business more efficiently. Our next steps includes:

Ownership transfer of business accounts to account coordinators

To introduce a hierarchy of roles and permissions into account management, we need to research the people involved in the end-to-end business process, their job titles and common responsibilities, and why some members should be limited to perform specific tasks based on their role in the organization and have access to certain features and why other members have full control (can manage everything).

In designing and shipping the experience for account managers, we identified that they will have full control of an organization portfolio and can manage everything, including managing users, verify coverage status before admission in the service and can develop reports to gain visibility into the business financials. They can also create the organization portfolio and assign themselves advanced options and change someone's access and permissions in the application. Roles will become particularly useful in the next phase of development as the account coordinators access and permissions is systematic assigned by the account manager that adheres strictly to their role requirements in the organization.

Support French translation in order to reach non-English speaking employees

At Akira Health, we have employees and organizations that are stationed in provinces like Quebec where French is their official language and English is secondary. Employees that operates in these provinces much prefer to view the account management system in the language of their preference. In the next launch, we will roll out translation services to provide our partners with the ability to see their business analytics and all existing account management features in French.

To validate French localization and ensure that the translation meet the needs of our French target audience, I will be collaborating with the Director of Marketing to understand how to localize French content in a way that best reflects the Akira Health voice and tone.

Looking for your next product designer?

Email me at hello@brlam.co or send me a message through LinkedIn. Let’s get in touch!

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hello@brlam.co

Looking for your next product designer?

Email me at hello@brlam.co or send me a message through LinkedIn. Let’s get in touch!

Social

Twitter

Mastodon

Connect

hello@brlam.co

Looking for your next product designer?

Email me at hello@brlam.co or send me a message through LinkedIn. Let’s get in touch!

Social

Twitter

Mastodon

Connect

hello@brlam.co