Enterprise Design Can be Innovative. Just Ask Fast Company.

By Susan Dybbs

We’re excited to announce Collective Health’s new, internal admin platform received honorable mentions in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards in both the Health and User Experience categories. With more than 2,500 applicants, we’re honored to be chosen (twice!) and included alongside some of the biggest companies in the world.

Like all great innovations, our internal platform stemmed from a critical business challenge: how do we ensure our Member Advocates — the smart, empathetic healthcare experts who support our members — can provide the best experience in the industry at scale?

We can hire the smartest people to answer our members’ questions (which we do), but without proper tools at their fingertips the experience will fall short. In order to serve our rapidly growing member base — today, we help more than 80,000 people and that number grows exponentially every year — we needed to build an internal experience that empowered our Member Advocates.

So, how did we do it? We built a platform that:

• Provides a detailed, but easy-to-digest picture of the member and their benefits (current and past benefits, care history, claims activity) and detailed notes about recent interactions they’ve had with Collective Health (conversations or ongoing questions and concerns the member has).
• Recognizes a member’s phone number or email and quickly identifies key indicators that enables our team to route the member to the best suited Member Advocate. For example, our platform knows to connect a member that has a child with autism with someone that has expertise in behavioral health.
• Enables Collective Health to standby our high Protected Health Information (PHI) protection standards, especially within families. Members are often part of a larger family unit but might not have authorization for their dependents’ PHI. Our team designed color coded alerts and cues to communicate the PHI permissions family members have for one another, enabling our Member Advocates to keep track of what information they can and cannot share.
• Utilizes a systems-led approach, characterized by re-usable UI components enabling faster design and development.

By intuitively providing our Member Advocates with all the information they need to help a member before they even answer the phone, we’ve redefined people’s expectations for service. Now, when our members call, email, or live chat, the first person they talk to knows their medical history, any issues they’re actively dealing with, and can even predict the questions they’re going to ask. Our members can trust the person on the other end of the line to help them understand their best treatment options. And our members can have their questions answered quickly — on average, it only takes 19 seconds for a Member Advocate to answer the phone.

We’re thrilled Fast Company recognized the impact of our team’s smart, innovative product design. While internal technology platforms aren’t always the sexiest projects, Collective Health’s admin platform sets a new industry standard and will eventually allow millions of consumers to actually enjoy interacting with their health benefits.

A special shoutout to the team who created and continue to work on this platform: Melissa Martin, Sonia Koesterer, Jeff Gaskill, Priyal Mehta, Erica Horowitz, Malcolm Kane, Edward Wang, and Akins Van Horne.

Interested in helping us change the way health benefits work? We’d love to meet you. Check out our open positions.