Overview
Peachy Pay (defunct startup) focused on streamlining the bill payment process for patients and medical providers.
As the founding designer, I had the opportunity to create a seamless experience where healthcare patients could pay their bills in just three taps on their phones. Key features included:
Provide patients with transparent payment plans and friendly financing options.
Automate patient payment plans. Ability to break down a large $ bill into smaller payments.
Helped providers collect $160k+ in payments.
Unfortunately, the current healthcare system in the US is fraught with complexity and red tape. One major problem is that healthcare patients often don’t have a clear way to pay their bills. Studies have shown that 80% of unpaid bills under $200 end up in collections, primarily because patients are unaware they owe money. At Peachy, our main goal was to modernize the bill payment process, making it easy for patients and automating bill processing for providers.
My contribution
Product strategy
User research
Branding
Product design
The team
2 x Cofounders
2 x ENG
Year
2020
Process
What's the current state of patient bills?
We set out to study how patients manage their medical bills. Given the broad scope of the healthcare space, we focused on the complex payment systems healthcare practices use for billing and receiving payments from patients. Post-treatment, we found that providers typically bill patients in three ways:
Mail a paper bill
Post visit, providers mail out bills for patient to pay for their visit. Some states require a paper bill be sent after a period of time (we weren't looking to skirt the law here, so this practice stays intact). Patients are tasked with having to write a check, buy a stamp, use an envelope, and mail the payment to the provider before the due date.
Payment portals
Some providers give patients the ability to pay their bills using clunky desktop-optimized payment portals. This method typically relies on patients using a unique PIN that was previously mailed to them.Call the office or pay in person
If the other two methods fail, patients must call the office and pay their bill over the phone, providing their payment card information and often being placed on hold. This method is very time-consuming for all parties.
So why aren't patients paying their healthcare bills?
It's a cumbersome process for patients and providers
After understanding the arduous patient payment experience, we identified common themes around bill payments. We distilled these issues into four key themes that we aimed to solve for both patients and providers. By addressing these themes, we aimed to simplify the payment process and improve the experience for both patients and providers.
Providers want to recoup payment for the services they’ve provided. However, the previously mentioned areas only address half of the problem. Many providers and their staff must spend a significant portion of their time managing billing, collecting, and reconciling patient payments. This diverts valuable time and resources away from patient care, negatively impacting the overall healthcare experience for both providers and patients. The current process is inefficient and detrimental to all aspects of the healthcare journey.
Create a frictionless payment experience
How can Peachy help?
The team strategized on tackling the four pain points by making Peachy a seamless patient experience that meets users where they are. Peachy’s target audience, primarily Millennials and Gen Z, are digitally native, prioritize convenience, and expect frictionless interactions. The current payment options are neither safe nor convenient for them to securely and confidently make a payment. To make matters worse, neither patients nor providers feel confident with this process.
Here are the ways the team addressed each pain point:
First take
Early wireframes
Based on our discovery research, we created a simplified workflow. We were able to reduce the high-friction process to a seamless three-tap payment experience. That’s right—a patient could pay their bill with just three taps on their mobile device. That’s it.
How did we do this?
We removed all unnecessary steps that hindered a patient from quickly making a payment. Patients didn’t need to set up a Peachy account. Really? Yes. Would we have preferred they create one? Of course! There are many good reasons to have a Peachy account, but realistically, if a patient only saw a specialist once and never returned, there was no need for them to create an account. Instead, we focused on onboarding more providers onto Peachy who see patients regularly. This way, in the future, patients would be more inclined to create a Peachy account to manage billing from all their healthcare providers.
Iteration
Refining the core patient experience
Once we had our initial wireframes, we conducted 14 user testing sessions. These sessions combined discovery and usability testing with a prototype user testing session to maximize insights. The testing validated our core hypothesis that patients wanted a seamless, familiar, and intuitive experience that guided them in completing their primary task—paying a bill easily. Below are the areas where the product needed improvement:
Updated Design
Easier in app navigability
Patients can review all bill details
Improved copy writing that provided bette context for features
Outcome
Patients no longer need to deal with a broken payment system once their providers start using Peachy. Both patients and providers now have one less concern and can focus on what truly matters—patient care.
Here are the metrics we achieved:
