Member Portal: Physician Search
This project was a major modernization initiative focused on automating and enhancing the Physician Search and Selection experience for Blue Shield of California members across all lines of business. Blue Shield’s initiative centered around modernizing the member experience to deliver a real-time, self-service Physician Search and Selection tool. This initiative was critical for the business as it required migrating from a legacy directory to a powerful, transactional data system, ensuring data accuracy and unlocking major operational efficiencies. I led the product design to transform this process. The final solution eliminated manual intervention, providing users with instant, accurate physician details and automated selection flows.
Member Portal: Physician Search
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Key Contributions
Role: Lead Product Designer
✓ I redesigned a fragmented, legacy physician selection process into a modern, real-time, self-service digital experience for all lines of business.
✓ I designed the UX to leverage accurate, real-time provider data, ensuring transparency and building member trust during the critical doctor selection process.
✓ I delivered automated self-service options, successfully increasing the online completion rate by 16% (core project KPI).
✓ I significantly reduced submission-related user errors (by 11%), directly mitigating call volume and contributing to approx $50,000 in estimated annual operational savings.
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Problem
The Physician Selection feature was an outdated, legacy experience suffering from numerous unaccounted use cases that caused users to frequently error out of the flow. Specifically, the existing experience was broken due to:
Outdated Information: Critical information was not communicated, and the UI was plagued by outdated design, spacing issues, and unclear copy.
Inaccurate Logic: Back-end logic surfaced physicians who were not accepting new patients, frustrating members.
Lack of Transparency: There was no display or communication for a new physician's effective start date or the user's current and future physician status.
The Solution
I delivered a redesign of the existing online doctor-changing process. This change immediately made the online process frictionless and reliable, showing Blue Shield members real-time status (if their doctor was truly accepting new patients now) and clarity (exactly when their physician selection would take effect).
In short, this member experience went from being a frustrating cause of user errors to a fast, trustworthy self-service option that actually worked.
Impact
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16%
Increase: Online Completion Rate
Successfully improved the member conversion rate for online physician selection (core project KPI).
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11%
Decrease: User Error Rate
Reduced submission-related support calls by 11% immediately after launch.
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$50,000
Saved: Annual Operational Cost
Reduced complex issues routed to the call center from an average of 1,000 monthly down to approx 300.