Insurance Estimation

Primary Role: UX Researcher/Designer

Responsibilities: Develop and execute a research plan that explored the initiative of insurance estimation and produce a vision that can be adopted across all practice management products and specialties.

Tools: Powerpoint, Evernote, Adobe Xd, Omnigraffle, draw.io

My biggest research project and my final project at Carestream Dental involved coming up with a direction for an area of interest as determined by our product line manager. While this originated from our oral surgery software team, there was an additional ask of investigating the area of interest and producing a solution that can be adopted by other specialties and software in the company.

I brainstormed an initial list of things that would have to be done as part of this research effort. Eventually I rolled it all up into two things I wanted to learn:

1. What is the opinion of insurance estimation by other dental specialties?
2. How does our software (and others) facilitate insurance estimation-related workflows?

Activities that were done to learn about those two questions included site visits, surveys, and discussion with trainers and salespeople. This was done as much as possible across all specialties/products.

Prior to this project, I had used previous artifacts that I produced from other research efforts a few months before to supplement the research efforts from this project.

For our week-long meeting with the development team and product team, I put together a presentation that outlined my research plan, what was discovered, and from that, high level ideas derived from those insights. My goal was to establish empathy for the users and the pain points in their workflows and to use that to get agreement that the high level vision that was drafted is a good direction to go.

The proposed vision was divided into chunks to be prioritized by the development team based on how they anticipate on implementing it. Any design compromises were discussed and iterated on during these meetings.

Coming up with the vision involved understanding of the impact of insurance estimation across all dental specialties and looking at opportunities when considering all of Carestream Dental's software products installed and being used in the offices. Because of the scale of the vision, I had also proposed other alternatives that are focused on a single product line, but positioned it as something that could scale to include all product lines.

Because this was my final project at Carestream Dental, I was not around to see it through. Whether parts of it, all of it, or none of it gets prioritized to be implemented in the near future will be up to the product and leadership team.