A compassionate design approach to consumer payments at athenahealth

Hi there! I am excited to share what my team has been working on at athenahealth within our Consumer Financials group. If you are a designer, product manager, or engineer in healthcare, please reach out via linkedin. I’d love to have a conversation and share even more about the great work being done here in patient experience and open roles that might be a good fit. For those less familiar, athenahealth serves as the technology backbone for thousands of medical practices around the country, offering cloud-based services including EHR, RCM, patient engagement, care coordination, population health, and telehealth services, just to name six. Join us.

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Medical billing and payments can be stressful experiences, often because we as consumers do not always understand our bills and so can sometimes feel blindsided by costs. Confusion and stress can delay payment and unintentionally reduce trust between a patient and medical provider.

At athenahealth, we are designing experiences that address these challenges through our Consumer Finance experience group. As we started to overhaul and modernize the design of our digital payment touch points, we asked some foundational questions to help guide us. We know what consumers don’t want. What does the consumer — the person — want in the context of healthcare payments? We codified the answers into design principles that support our detailed design work and affect every decision we make. Those principles are: communicate about medical expenses with compassion; give insight into the healthcare system, and be as easy and flexible as other digital services. Here are some tangible ways in which our experiences are making billing experiences more compassionate, insightful, and easy.

Communicate about medical expenses with compassion.

Compassionate digital interactions model thoughtful dialogues that seek to consider and acknowledge the context of each individual. In the case of medical bills, we know that once the pleasantries are aside, we need to deliver accurate, timely, and trustworthy information about cost and patient responsibility in each transaction.

Give insight into the healthcare system.

Consumers want clear information about their financial account status. Clear can be defined as visual, progressively disclosed, and educational. Providing clear information infused with compassion reinforces modern, trustworthy payment experiences.

Be as easy and flexible to use as other digital services.

Consumers want medical billing to work like other forms of billing and payments they’ve come to expect through ever pervasive digital commerce. That means low-friction payment experiences, diverse payment methods, and easy to understand payment options particularly in large balance situations.

We are aiming to enable financially sustainable delivery of healthcare.

We are conscious of how design choices affect the balance between the needs of patients and medical practices. However, with billing, it is often a false dichotomy. The more we speak with patients and billing managers especially, the more that becomes clear; most patients want to pay their bills on-time once they once understand why.

As a key technology partner to both healthcare organizations and their consumers, we aim to enhance mutual understanding through better design. We believe modern, consumer-centered updates are a crucial step and example of how we move forward together — with compassion, insight, and ease.

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A special thank you to several incredibly talented designers at athenahealth, who have played a foundational role from strategy through to implementation. Thanks to Jackie Sliwinski, Camri Hinkie, Fabiola Einhorn, Sara Wells, Heather Abbott, and the larger patient experience product and engineering team for helping us to see this essential work through.