Innovation at CVS Health Case Study
How I successful designed a pilot & led it from MVP to scale
My role + note about proprietary data
I began these pilots as the UX Design & Strategy Lead, working closely with stakeholders including Client, Customer Success and Sales. Hands-on, I generated concepts & rapid prototypes until we had a unified vision. I was then promoted to Product Lead, and able to bring on a wonderful Product Manager, Design & Engineering team whom I oversaw as well as 4 other work streams. CVS Health maintains strict control over information to ensure data privacy and trust so only generalized data is shared here.
Why: Patients & business suffer when changes in coverage trigger frustrations
Have you gone to pick up a prescription refill, and after waiting in a long line, a tired pharmacist tells you it’s no longer covered and you need a prior auth or to call your MD for a new RX? 😩 This common problem is a significant cost driver for CVS Health and our clients. To help, we sent patients empathetic, easy-to-understand messages & actions to choose before their refills were due, saving time and money.
KPIs & Results
✅ Increased NPS Scores by 3 points
✅ Increased Digital Registrations by 5%
Note: digitally registered rate plans higher and save ~ $17/year
✅ Reduce call-in rates by 8%
✅ Reduce % of ‘first refill’ coverage surprises at pharmacies by 10%
Please note the results are based on early data and may evolve as more information comes in.
I created video above with marketing creatives to help secure second phase client customers & assist employee onboarding.
Approach
To ensure our pilots were successful, the needs of our client, business, IT and end-member needs needed to synthesized into a pilot that was:
- legally and logistically feasible
- features were prioritized in alignment with outcome goals, strategic impact and capacity
1. Kick-off, listening tour & research review. Meet with stakeholders to build rapport and understood their goals. This included reviewing and diving in deep to understand the extensive research on customer pain points.
2. Create concept presentations & refine with client until buy-in. I created initial visual concepts and decks that spoke about the exciting ways digital interventions could address customer pain points in a scalable manner and refined them with key stakeholders.
3. Hypothesis generation > testing > refinement > execution plan & sign-off: With buy-in on pilot concept, I was able to recruit internal team and promoted to lead product. Working closely with team, prototypes evolved, user interviews were conducted. We hypothesized that if we could reach patients before their plans stared and make it easy for them to digitally enroll and make adjustments to their RX before their new plans started that we’d reach our goals. Since patients must only be contacted in legally compliant manners, we worked with marketing to add QR code and invites to existing mailer as well as providing employer-based plans with emails and internal awareness collateral. See video below.
Using Miro and asynchronous collaboration tools, we were able to quickly identify features and prioritization which we captured in Confluence and Rally (initial epic, features and user stories required to fund next process steps.)
4. Product creation and refinements with close attention to set KPIs: Based on the delivery of vision, roadmap, features and users tories, I led the design and content strategy team execute in Figma using our enterprise design system. These were tested and refined until member satisfaction indicators were positive and stakeholder buy in was secured.
5. First Pilot Launch: The pilot, inspired by my initial mock-ups but evolved, refined and implemented with CVS enterprise design components and interactions was successfully launched in 3 months. A major accomplishment from an enthusiastic collaboration across cross-functional teams. Happy client and collaborators.
6. Present findings, get new contracts, plan refinements: Post-launch, I played a key role in presenting the pilot outcomes and creating packages to sell to additional clients. We successful sold to 4 new clients, covering over 50k lives.
7. Expanded Pilot Launch: I oversaw the feature expansion definition and scrum teams who launched the phase 2 pilots. I ensured our client sales team has the collateral it needed and presented to new clients.
8. Vision & Roadmap: Exhibiting my strengths from years in product strategy, I created a roadmap to scale the successful pilot to the entire business which required complex shifts in the treatment of member IDs and thus an endorsement from architecture, engineering, design, legal, privacy and sales teams.
User Story: Auntie's Journey
Being able to distill the why and what for product choices into simple stories can bring stakeholders together to more quickly understand and critique proposals before they get started. I created this simple user story graphic below as other review materials during our hypothesis generation phase.
Milestones
Initial Pilot: The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was successfully launched in three months with one commercial client. It is my honor to note that the initial mock-ups I created helped to expedite and inspire this swift delivery. And, our team came together with great enthusiasm -wonderful group who delivered.
Expanded Pilot: The success of the initial pilot led to the addition of four new commercial clients, covering more than 50,000 lives.
Scaling to the entire book of business: Based on the success of this initial pilot series, I was part of a cross functional team charged with laying out the requirements to scale the features to the book of business. This is a complex endeavor that also works to helps prioritize the work required to create a unified CVS digital ID. In order to process the adjudication of all formulary changes while keeping data privacy and firewalls in tact requires this modernization.
A verbose disclosure by a powerful assistant:
The eloquence on display throughout this page was done with the help of grammatical reviews and refinements by the illustrious GPT-4, a maestro of words, and my collaborative companion in weaving these narratives. While I directed the symphony of thoughts, GPT-4 assisted the keyboard of refinement, ensuring each phrase hit the right note. Here’s to the harmony of human and machine, bringing forth a composition that resonates with clarity and insight.
Generated based on prompts that began, “can you create a simple, earnest but witty disclosure statement that explains that the content of this page was written with the assisted of GPT4 ”