The Medicare Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) required legal compliance to offer all Med D members of 65 years of age and older a prescription payment plan to help split up high drug costs into more manageable monthly payments. The work required having to accommodate legal language in existing pharmacy products, plus guide members to understand and navigate a non-integrated third-party vendor for plan enrollment and payment management services. I led and delivered solutions that enabled discoverability and seamless navigation of payment plan resources. The work resulted in an expected ~75% of enrollment via calls and ~25% of enrollment via digital self-service among the targeted population group.
Under the Medicare Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), prescription drug plans had to comply with offering payment plan resources for patients with high out-of-pocket costs. The challenge was to design an experience that met all of the requirements mandated by Medicare IRA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) within the existing digital pharmacy service, plus giving eligible Medicare members of 65 years of age and older access to payment options using a non-integrated third party vendor.
The solution I delivered presented educational language, tools, and actions to help Medicare members understand how to access their prescription payment plan options as seamlessly as possible. Design solutions were based on the insights collected from usability testing my partner and I performed midway through iterations. My team and I ensured explicit content guidance and interaction design cues for members in highly visible places every step of their journey from start-to-finish to ensure confidence in understanding that their the payment plan was managed through a separate third party service.
My team and I delivered a solution that achieved legal compliance. Not only that, Medicare members now had access to resources and options of the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan to help manage high costs as needed, reducing financial barriers for prescription access and management.
Out of 400 members who successfully opted in to the plan after the first week, 25% of members enrolled digitally and 75% enrolled via the call center. While the numbers skewed heavily in favor of enrollment with calls, this was expected given known behaviors and trends of the Medicare population. Market surveys have reported that roughly ~80% of older populations of 65+ years of age were more reliant on picking up the phone and calling for support compared to actively engaging with digital channels, simply due to lower digital literacy or less access to digital tools.
I collaborated with numerous partners and stakeholders across digital web and native app teams on this large time-sensitive effort to meet a government mandate. I led and delivered UX solutions that involved rigorous stakeholder discussions, reviews, and processes week over week to meet federal legal requirements while also advocating for the end user by mitigating any risks of disruption and incoherence at every connected touchpoint of the digital experience. My core focus and goal was to provide an intuitive and seamless end-to-end flow against known service design challenges and constraints involving a non-integrated third party service.