Regional Health System

Large health systems do not have a patient experience problem in the abstract — they have it in the specifics. Billing statements that nobody can read. Patient portals built for clinicians, not patients. Care journey communications written by lawyers. Each surface is owned by a different team, each team optimizes for its own metric, and the patient gets the seams. Our client knew this. The question was where to start and how to make the fix stick.

We did not begin with redesigns. We began with patient journey mapping — a single artifact that put every team on the same map, with the same patient, at the same touchpoint. From there the work fanned out: an EOB redesign grounded in readability research and tested with real patients; a patient portal UX redesign that prioritized the three tasks portals actually get used for; and a healthcare design system that captured the patterns so the next team didn't have to start from scratch. The design system was the multiplier — it turned individual project wins into organizational defaults.

The patient experience became a shared object across the organization — not a slogan, an actual map and an actual system. EOB comprehension improved measurably under usability testing. Portal task completion went up on the redesigned surfaces. Most importantly, the design system is now used by teams we never worked with directly, which means the patient experience improvements compound rather than decay.