Patients often find information about medication costs, insurance coverage, and financial assistance programs to be overwhelming. Resources exist to help patients navigate this landscape, but many don’t use them because they don’t understand what these resources are, or what they have to offer.
Our Challenge
Finding out how much treatment will cost can be a complicated process involving health insurance providers and follow-up conversations with the prescribing physicians. Services exist to help patients find this information, but more patients could benefit if they understood what these services can actually do for them. Our challenge was to rethink how to talk about such services so that more patients could understand their value and use them.
We heard from patients and listened to the questions they were looking to answer.
Collaborating
to Apply UPL
To tackle this challenge, we organized a co-creation session with patients, office managers, advocacy groups, social workers, and call center agents. We spent time doing activities that helped us understand what patients wanted to know when it came to their medication costs, and the kinds of questions they were asking at different points in their journey. We learned what many patients find confusing about insurance and healthcare costs — from the language used to the processes they need to follow. We then worked with our participants to prototype more relatable ways to explain the financial resources and the processes and steps involved. After the session, we validated the prototypes with additional patients so that we could create a single resource.
Our Output
Our approach to explaining financial resources focuses on what each resource is used for, when they may be appropriate, and how to gain access to them. We took extra care to be as inclusive as possible, so that patients in various financial situations can relate and find the relevant information they may need.