Collaborative and Configurable: Curate Supports Healthcare Company in Building a Dynamic Consumer Data Application

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Healthcare

Collaborative and Configurable: Curate Supports Healthcare Company in Building a Dynamic Consumer Data Application

Team building a Dynamic Data Application

How to consolidate a deluge of consumer engagement data

What does a leading healthcare company do with a deluge of data? A plethora of consumer engagement metrics may sound like a great problem to have, but it’s still a problem, especially when spread across multiple business units and tucked into too many spreadsheets and presentations. That information needs to be sorted, analyzed, and accessible to different stakeholders, to figure out if programs and campaigns are working (or lagging). This national healthcare company saw an opportunity to better track and scale that engagement across initiatives and platforms, and bring together disparate data sources to leverage their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). They partnered with Curate to find a specific, holistic approach to building a data insight application to:
  • Collate NPS data based on outreach campaigns
  • Track trends and leading indicators
  • Be easily accessible for a myriad of internal teams
Visualization of healthcare case management processes enhanced by newly built business logic and smart workflows

The Challenge: So much data, so little causal analysis

The company was currently lacking causal analysis of its key engagement and performance indicators: NPS scores. As a top national healthcare player with multiple lines of business, they needed to see, prove, and review how their consumers were engaging across campaigns (everything from emails, texts, and phone calls to mailers and digital ads). What worked, what needed to be improved, and what was being duplicated? If a campaign wasn’t aligned with a consumer’s healthcare needs and status, then it wasn’t likely they’d give a positive NPS (and even less likely that the company could track that journey). Their initial request to Curate sounded simple: a designer to help with the front-end of a new web application. The company’s data science team was experienced in building data capabilities, but not typically with an end user in mind. They needed to standardize their data sources and reporting, which was currently a clunky process of running analytics per request and creating slide decks. This wasn’t scalable or accessible.
But Curate stressed the importance of product development goals and a strategy for human-centric product design, and the company’s project needs were refined:
  • How can we build a data model that aligns virtual NPS scores with demographics and assesses the potential impact of consumer engagement based on the company’s outreach campaigns?
  • How can we make this accessible to multiple business units and internal initiatives?
  • How can we ensure it’s flexible and accessible enough for different stakeholders across the company?
Together, they set out to build a model that would track the potential impact of where their consumers landed, depending on each outreach campaign, and be user-friendly and intuitive for internal teams to engage in a consistent, transactional way.

The Solution: Building the right model (to build the right tool)

To paint a room inside a house, the first step isn’t grabbing a brush and slathering the walls. Arguably, the prep work is the most important part of the process – from cleaning, patching, and rearranging furniture to taping off tricky areas and starting with a coat of primer. Curate employs this pragmatic approach to app development, as well as the team and process supporting it. Before any wireframes, coding, or testing, there had to be discovery, alignment, and training. They established a lightweight, agile model that focused on four key pillars for kickstarting the project:
  1. User discovery and team building
  2. High-level planning horizon (with coordinated tools)
  3. Common design mission and vision
  4. Training for outcomes

1. Meet and build the team

Meeting people where they are is pivotal for building trust at the start of any project. The company didn’t have a project model preference, so Curate dove into user discovery, mapping stakeholders and interviewing internal teams, especially those who were skeptical of a new app and its efficacy. Bringing these “internal detractors” into the project right away yielded a group of super users who were empowered to use their voices and expertise across every phase of the project. By onboarding these existing team members to work alongside supporting developers and designers, the project immediately had advocates with vast institutional knowledge and a hunger to see improvements to their day-to-day.

2. High level planning horizon

With a team in place and user needs outlined, organization came to the forefront. Curate mapped out user needs and defined a system map, well before any UI and design sprints started. Then they built out a long-term project calendar based on quarterly and monthly outcomes. This aligned with a consistent, rigorous schedule of daily, nightly, and weekly scrum-oriented meetings, along with weekly executive stakeholder meetings. An agile development lifecycle was familiar enough to existing teams and kept the new project team on track. Sidenote: the importance of simple, useful tools The company wasn’t using any specific tools or processes for their development lifecycle. Curate’s lightweight, agile process includes a reference set of tools, but the client was more comfortable using an app they already had employed (SmartSheets). Curate adapted their process to incorporate this tool, which allowed them to quickly arrive at a well-documented, prioritized product backlog.

3. Common design mission and vision

When integrated properly, design is a project element that ensures consistency, brand alignment, and a seamless user experience. While some consider it the final touch, Curate insists it’s a necessary step for the project itself. Like many large brands, this healthcare company used a myriad of design resources across its brands and subsidiaries, from playbooks and design kits to language requirements and full component libraries for employee-facing applications. Curate brought in senior designers who were familiar with both a large brand design hierarchy and the specific tools this company used. It was immediate self-sufficiency, which kept the larger project moving forward. Because team members had experience with this scope of design, meetings were quick and efficient:
  • Connect all the design dots
  • Make small suggestions to ensure compliance with existing design elements
  • Stay on top of accessibility

4. Training for outcomes

A project is truly agile if it focuses on outcomes. And the best way to prioritize outcomes is to ensure your team is both prepared and flexible. Curate understood this company’s strength was its existing experience in sourcing, normalizing, and querying large data sets. So the priority was to build the strongest foundation possible around this experience and their end-goal of an accurate and dynamic application. The team and project plan was in place, and it was time for Curate to guide the company toward those outcomes, and course-correct when things did not go as planned. One such event occurred in the project’s discovery phase, when Curate found the team didn’t have a necessary API for bringing data from Google’s BigQuery into the application properly. Leveraging Curate’s Talent Solution team, they quickly sourced the right developers with full stack and API development backgrounds. They adapted the project plan to overlap design and development’s starting points, in order to confirm both teams were informed of each other’s plans and next steps. And most importantly, the discovery, search, and adjustments were completed with minimal impact on project timelines. Along the way, Curate also trained internal teams on efficient project setup for elements like a backlog structure, refinement session, and standard daily scrums – all processes that can be refined and repeated in future projects.

The Results: Adapting for better analysis and consumer outreach​

The healthcare company’s initial project launch confirmed three elements of success:
  • A rollout to super users yielded positive feedback.
  • A presentation to senior leadership echoed that positive feedback, and reinforced the application was strong enough to scale right away.
  • Several new business units will be onboarded in the next quarter, with a focus on additional initiatives to further improve and enhance the NPS tool overall.

Product highlights: a more predictive NPS tool​

A clean interface gives users the option to easily select a business unit, initiative, or group to assess. It generates up-to-date charts and graphs for easy review and includes search, hover tips, and an embedded contact us form. Even after the application was built, the team never lost sight of outcomes. More appealing than the usability of the application itself, is the ease with which two primary stakeholder groups can analyze NPS data and quickly pivot to address issues in both consumer experience and financial impact.

User Group 1: Consumer experience leaders

  • Who they are – These senior leaders are managing large teams responsible for overarching plans, such as Medicare.
  • How the new tool helps – They can quickly respond to an event or trend by using the self-service tool to guide teams and commercial plans on how to adapt and better engage in outreach.

User Group 2: Focused business unit stakeholders

  • Who they are – These managers are directly engaging with specific outreach initiatives that require demographic and behavioral consumer data.
  • How the new tool helps – They can regularly access data to historically model what the impact of ongoing programs has been, then extrapolate what it would be if the program was repeated, altered, or changed altogether.
Project momentum is strong, and the company is also planning two more potential projects regarding a self-service data model for consumer experience, and a 360-degree member data application.

Highly collaborative, highly configurable project models

As a major top five national healthcare player with multiple lines of business, the company’s ability to engage consumers was rooted in their internal teams’ ability to analyze existing outreach programs and performance. Now they can review and scale those programs in real time. Curate’s project model, as well as their philosophy, is highly collaborative and highly configurable. Agile projects are, at their core, a collection of tools, people, and processes that will achieve outcomes. And training teams to do and replicate this model is a priority for Curate. Curate supported this healthcare company by playing to its strengths: they were adept at building service-layer data capabilities, and Curate filled in the gaps with the right agile model, training, and UI experience to help them deploy both a strong application and a foundation for future projects.

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