Background.

In 2018, The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandated the development of an API to provide medical claims to insurance companies. This was the first time these companies would have both medical and eligibility data for these particular plan members.

I joined this project one month after the API launched. Uptake among customers was slow as was the on-boarding process.

At SemanticBits, I was charged with understanding our customer’s perceptions and attitudes related to the API and data provided from it.

Method.

I interviewed internal stakeholders to understand the expected intent and purpose before moving on to potential user groups.

Among insurance groups, I learned barriers to uptake were related to misperceptions of value and usage. Among those who were interested, they could vaguely tie their interest back to mandated programs, but not easily, and had a difficult time clearly articulating the data they’d receive.

This led to a further area of discovery: were there existing federal programs we could tie into to communicate value (secondary research)?

Impact.

Marketing: Secondary research led us to the understanding that our product value could be directly tied to two mandated federal programs. This meant immediate incentives and talking points with customers.

Data Strategy: Hearing from customers that they needed to “see” the data in order to make informed decisions about its value, a large undertaking among contractors, UX Researchers, and Engineers took place to translate and unwind the data behind the API to a flat file view.