Transforming the End-to-End Healthcare Experience

Company: Optum (part of UnitedHealth Group)

Date: 2019-present

Brief: At Optum, I lead service design initiatives focused on simplifying complex healthcare journeys across digital and human touchpoints. My work helped align cross-functional teams around shared customer insights and drove strategy for large-scale transformation efforts.

High Level

My Role

• Unify fragmented healthcare experiences across digital products, call centers, and care delivery systems to improve usability and reduce friction for members and internal teams.

Opportunities

• Disconnected systems created inconsistent experiences across channels.

• Internal teams lacked shared visibility into end-to-end journeys.

• Research was siloed and underutilized in decision-making.

Impact

• Influenced strategic roadmap for Enterprise Journey and Enterprise Ecosystem transformations.

• Enabled cross-team alignment through journey mapping workshops.

• Identified key friction points leading to improved usability and reduced support burden.

• Established a foundation for ongoing experience measurement.

The Problem Space

Across Optum, I consistently encountered a pattern of fragmented service experiences:

• Members were forced to navigate disconnected systems across digital tools, call centers, and care delivery.

• Internal teams operated in silos, with limited visibility into the full end-to-end experience.

• Ownership of the experience was often unclear, leading to gaps and inconsistencies across touchpoint.

These challenges were not isolated to a single product or journey - they were systemic across many parts of the organization.

To address these systemic challenges, I focused on making the invisible visible - helping teams see, align around, and improve the full service experience.

My Approach

Given the range of initiatives I supported, my approach adapted to context. However, most projects followed a human-centered, systems-oriented process.

1. Discovery & Alignment

   • Stakeholder interviews across product, operations, and clinical teams

   • Audit of existing journeys, tools, and touchpoints

2. Research & Synthesis

   • Qualitative research with members and internal users

   • Identified systemic breakdowns across the service ecosystem

3. Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting

   • Facilitated workshops to co-create current & future state journeys

   • Exposed pain points, ownership gaps, and dependencies across front-stage and back-stage experiences

4. Strategy & Activation

   • Translated insights into opportunity areas and service concepts

   • Partnered with teams to prioritize and operationalize improvements

Outcomes

While each initiative varied, these patterns and approaches remained consistent across my work and I was able to:

• Gain a shared understanding of complex service ecosystems.

• Identify and prioritize high-impact experience improvements.

• Reduce fragmentation across touchpoints.

• Establish a foundation for more consistent, user-centered decision making.