Health Spendings

Background

The “Super App” was a new offering from CVS Health that integrated various health services into a single platform combining efforts across all business lines - Aetna, CVS retail, Specialty, & Caremark. The app would support insured, uninsured or users with unknown insurance, with features ranging from health triage, caregiving, medication management, rewards, and health spending - A one stop shop for all things CVS. Health spending, in particular, was uncharted territory with no existing product or business ownership. This made it ambiguous, but also exciting as an open space for creative freedom and exploration.

The Problem

One of the biggest challenges was the lack of clarity surrounding health spending—both in terms of the epic and the real-world issue of understanding how much things cost and why. People struggle with basic questions like "How much does it cost?" and "How do I pay for it?" due to the complexity of healthcare and insurance systems. As mentioned before, there was no single team owning this space, leaving it undefined and uncertain on how to navigate.

My task

My initial task was to improve the user experience around health spending, specifically by addressing cost transparency with the goal of making navigating health spendings straightforward and clear for all users - whether insured, uninsured, or paying out of pocket. This meant a flexible solution to provide clarity in pricing and payment methods, so users know what their medications and/or services will cost, and how they could pay before seeking care, so they could make the most informed healthcare decisions. Although this was the first ask, we had to do discovery work to figure out the “how”.

Personas

Before starting the journey map, I needed to refine our personas. CVS had two universal personas, Sophia and Michael, that were commonly used across various projects. I tailored these personas to better suit our specific problem to solve focusing on our core question of “What would make this easy for the user?”. For Michael, the emphasis was on understanding financial costs without letting costs hinder him from getting care. For Sophia, this was managing a busy schedule and staying on top of tracking her health-related tasks. These adjustments helped us align the journey map more closely with the needs of our target users.

Journey Maps

The next step was mapping out the users’ individual journeys. There was no template on the visuals, and I wanted to move beyond the traditional happy sad faces on a classic journey map, so I used images and animations to capture the users’ experience and illustrate what it felt like to be in their shoes.

I began with Michael’s frustrations during his visits to Health Services, Labs, and the pharmacy, followed by Sophia’s journey through Vaccination and Specialty services, highlighting her fears and anxieties at each stage, which made the pain points and challenges extremely clear.

For detailed journeys up close, see figma link.

Workshop Day 2 - Brainstorm

Next, we ran an exercise to get colleagues thinking about desired user and business outcomes for our features (epic). We first clarifyied the difference between business outcomes (organizational benefits) and user outcomes (product benefits for users), as well as some insights we had dug up from prior existing research done on Health Spendings.

Participants then came up with as many business objectives and distinct user outcomes as possible, which we then categorized as a group. With our desired outcomes in mind, we began ideating outcome-centered ideas. However, sensing uncertainty due to the new broader scope of Health Spendings, we pivoted the exercise to foster discussions and extract value where we could which ultimately provided us with enough insights to define features for the Super App.