For many, an interaction with their health insurer or medical provider is a near universal pain point. From physical maladies to long wait times to byzantine paper bills, the experience can often be fraught with difficulties.
It’s no surprise then that many have embraced technology as the silver bullet most likely to puncture all this frustration and suffering. But in a recent sit-down with Susan Dybbs of Collective Health, I realized these technologies need not be earth shattering innovations like robot surgery machines or life saving pharmaceuticals.
In her role as the VP of Product and Design for Collective Health, Susan is committed to smoothing a patient’s interaction with the healthcare system. From her point of view, creating a “minimal awesome experience” for patients can be as simple as improving user experience and interface. By making health insurance interactions painless, patients usually have a much better impression of their overall healthcare journey.
Collective Health is a six-year old company that helps companies and their people navigate employer-sponsored health insurance, wherein employees rely on their workplace to choose and administer a health plan. This is the type of insurance familiar to most working Americans – over 155 million people, more than Medicaid, Medicare and the ACA combined.
But the working relationship between employers, insurers and medical providers is fast evolving. Driven by rising patient expectations, shifting economics, and an ever-changing political and regulatory climate, more large employers are taking the reins on behalf of their employees and in service to their own bottom line.
For example, Walmart is partnering directly with health providers to deliver better health outcomes, and a consortium of JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon was announced in 2018 to better source healthcare solutions.
Within this environment, Dybbs’ job is to help employers and employees better understand, navigate, and pay for healthcare by improving the UX/UI portion of their journey. In the past, computer science was tasked with orchestrating this part of the patient experience, but Dybbs is one of a new wave of designers tasked with adding a human touch to the software approach.
Dybbs explained that the customer – or patient – journey is not just about external stakeholders but also the internal users. For her, a computer, smartphone, and associated apps are just tools we use to conduct business or manage our tasks. So it makes sense that as our familiarity grows so do our expectations and demands of those tools.
To create the “minimal awesome experience” she mentioned, Dybbs begins by ensuring that all the patient-facing information is correct and easy-to-use. Next, she wants to clearly communicate the obligation or steps that a user has to take. Finally, she understands the importance of shaping a patient’s expectations so that they feel their experience has been maximized or exceptional from start to finish.
It was eye-opening for me to learn that much of the health insurance industry still operates like it’s 1980. Fax machines, spreadsheets and phone calls remain a critical part of the process, which might explain why patients often feel confused and stymied by the system.
Dybbs is encouraged by the recent embrace of many technologies and innovations that have transformed other industries. She says employers in particular are helping drive this by adopting modern software tools, leveraging modern analytics capabilities, and deploying alternative digital health solutions ranging from new clinical models to telehealth.
To deliver on these capabilities and demands for clients, Dybbs has helped build Collective Health’s core technology offerings and its ability to operate at scale. Alongside these new tech tools, she has grown the product and design departments to several dozen people over the last five years.
But even though technology plays such a prominent role in her daily work, Dybbs had not pursued technology as a career. In fact, she was intimidated by technology and wanted to apply her natural math skills in the field of architecture.
After completing an immersive training at Havard’s Graduate School of Design, Dybbs became obsessed with influencing people’s experience. She loved the mix of right and left brained thinking and was fascinated with how architecture allowed her to influence the way in which people navigate through space.
But it was the 90’s and as the internet exploded, Dybbs realized that coding could give her the ability to have this same influence over the way people navigate within a digital space. That digital experience obsession remains the focus of her work at Collective Health today, helping people navigate the complexities of the health system.
Dybbs would like to see more women enter software product-related fields like user experience. She says it’s historically been dominated by men, but that there’s a need and room for more women to enter it. Especially since you do not need a traditional computer science degree to be successful.
For women that are interested, Dybbs says that technical chops are important. You don’t need to be an expert engineer but understanding technology and how to interface with engineers is important.
She also points to leadership skills, business expertise, using metrics for measurement, and the ability to empathize with users as needed traits. But most importantly, Dybbs said successful candidates are ones that demonstrate an ability to design and manage teams and culture to meet business goals.
