In my opinion, designing for the health care industry, particularly for the relationship between doctors and insurance companies, is one of the greatest design challenges of the 21st century. Here, I describe one project that sought to increase the clearance rate of electronic insurance claims for one organization in the audiology industry.
The client organization employed 8 Insurance Billing Specialists to bill thousands of insurance claims per month for over 200 clinics around the country. Their existing system of use included two different applications, 1 for the clinics and 1 for the billing office; this design caused many information gaps, overlaps and inefficiencies in their business processes.
The goals of the project were to:
Reduce the amount of time it takes to create, process and submit claims, electronically and by paper, to over 2000 Insurance Companies.
Design a Claims Console for the corporate office to review and process over 1000 claims per week.
Plug in the Claims Console to the Clinic Software so that the clinics can submit accurate claim information electronically to the billing department.
Update the existing software so that the clinic users can more accurately assess the status and track the claim through the course of the claims lifetime.
…all while meeting detailed accounting regulations.
As the lead (and only) business analyst, product manager and user interface designer, my responsibilities were to:
Identify the gaps and overlaps of information exchange between centralized billing and its
200+ clinics.
Document discovery and requirements, create UML deliverables, including user stories,
activity diagrams and use cases.
Design the user interface for both clinic, billing and administrative users.
Manage the multiple user objectives, and (often) conflicting business goals.
Work closely with the engineering team through development and testing, managing bugs, change orders and new requirements.
To read more about some of the design challenges I faced designing for these users, read Designing for 10-key Users.
More than 35 million people in our country are on food stamps – up 3 million just since January.
Living in Russian Hill, I’m just a stones throw away from the grocers lining the streets of Chinatown. I’m almost 100% positive most of my peers in this neighborhood and the other adjacent neighborhoods have never ventured in to these stores. To them it seems off putting, signs are in a foreign language, and the foods are exotic, even unidentifiable sometimes. To me though, Chinatown is my little secret. I love to cook a lot, and I could go to Whole Foods, but the spirit would dissipate once I checked my credit card bill after.
At Whole Foods you can get cherries for $7.99/lb, and in Chinatown you can get cherries for $0.99/lb. Even at Safeway, conventional apples are $1.99/lb, and in Chinatown they are $0.59/lb! Scallions? $0.39/each! Cilantro? $0.49/each! Eggplant? I bought some for $0.39/lb today. For the exchange in price, you get a cultural adventure. Some may argue that the quality is not as good, and I would agree. But not all fruits and vegetables need to be organic. And to be honest, I would rather eat some fruits and vegetables for cheap, rather than none at all because they are too expensive.
I have learned the laws of shopping in Chinatown over the past 3 years, and I will share some of them with you here:
Put your food on the scale as soon as the person in front of you is finished, else someone behind you will get there first.
Do not substitute an unidentified green leaf vegetable for spinach just because it looks like spinach; it won’t taste the same
Be prepared to see carcasses and single fishies lying dead in the freezer. If you don’t like it, don’t buy seafood and meat (I don’t).
Find the less busy stores – prices are $0.10/lb higher, but the food hasn’t been picked over.
Feel out the prices for the day. 1 store may have red peppers for $1.99/lb, another may have them for $1.29/lb.
Here are the foods I purchased today. I had a few recipes in mind while I was food shopping, and knew that I had some bulk foods to use at home which are not pictured here. I’m hoping my assumption that multiple recipes using similar ingredients will make my life easier will prove true.
Tonight I’m going to finish cooking for tomorrow. I’ll post the recipes and what I eat in tomorrow’s post.
What do you think?
60% of the clients San Francisco Food Bank served last year come from working households.
Today was Park(ing) Day around the world. SF Weekly explains that the day “was dreamed up by Rebar, a San Francisco-based art and design collective, and invites participants to convert a parking space into a green space that becomes a spontaneous public park for a day.” I went to North Beach on my lunch break to go to the bank, and to my pleasant surprise, I found a great spot outside of Lola’s on Grant Street. After lunch, I walked the full stretch and found about 5 park(ing) spots. I read a book, I hoola hooped, and I got some free lemonade! Having to decline the “adult” lemonade in exchange for the regular lemonade because I had to return to work was the only sad moment.
Here are some of my “better” pictures (give my blackberry a break). You can see the entire set here.
I’ve had this calendar hanging in my office for the majority of this year. It has 48 “classic” design mistakes, and I find each one wildly entertaining. My favorite month is July because I like the idea of playing shoots and ladders with my days. Did you roll the die wrong today? Go back to last week!
In the spirit of the last post, I wanted to post another video from an old friend, Michael Gellman. This is over 4 years old, but brings back a lot of memories from college. Enjoy!
It’s officially the end of the summer so I thought I would post a funny find from some new friends of mine down in Santa Monica. I planned a trip to LA this past weekend with every intention of carpooling there and back with some others traveling from the Bay Area. While my carpooling attempts failed (I just drove myself), these guys’ attempt took off amazingly. Enjoy!
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