Case Study
Platform-led UX transformation reduces rework by 30% and accelerates decision-making for a North American healthcare payer
How a platform-first operating model unified digital experiences, speed up decisions, and enabled scalable delivery across a large healthcare ecosystem
OUR CLIENT
A North American healthcare payer operating at enterprise scale
A large healthcare payer serves millions of members through a broad set of digital products and platforms. The initial rollout impacted approximately 13 million users, making consistency, scalability, and efficient delivery critical across a complex, multi-tenant digital ecosystem.
THE CHALLENGE
Disconnected digital experiences and inefficient workflows made it harder to scale and deliver efficiently
As the payer expanded its digital footprint, teams were building and working to optimize the digital experience in consistent ways across microapps and tenants. While the organization had invested in tools and platforms, its ways of working and experience architecture were not aligned to scale.
Four structural issues limited and slowed performance:
- Fragmented member experience across digital products: Inconsistent UX across microapps reduced experience continuity, making journeys feel less connected and harder for members to navigate.
- High rework due to delayed validation: Feedback cycles stretched over weeks, leading to late-stage changes and increased delivery inefficiencies.
- Disconnected design systems limited enterprise scalability: Eight independently developed design systems made it harder to govern UX patterns, reuse components, and standardize experiences across the enterprise. They were not designed to support faster AI-enabled product development.
- Siloed operating model slowed decisions: Disconnected workflows across product, engineering, and design slowed alignment and delayed execution.
These issues created a cycle of inefficiency, where fragmented delivery increased rework, slowed decision-making, and limited the organization’s ability to scale consistent digital experiences.
THE TRANSFORMATION
A reusable UX platform and operating model enabled scalable, consistent, and efficient digital delivery
UST helped the payer move away from product-by-product UX delivery. UST implemented a platform-led UX transformation, combining a governed operating model with scalable design architecture to improve delivery performance and member consistent experience.
- Created a platform-first design system for scalability: Built a modular, tokenized UI component model that teams could use across microapps, improving consistency and reducing duplication.
- Enabled continuous discovery and faster validation cycles: Connected discovery, validation, and QA workflows, reducing feedback cycles from weeks to days, and improving decision speed.
- Aligned cross-functional teams with a shared delivery model: Introduced continuous discovery and delivery practices that improved collaboration across product, engineering, and design, to help teams collaborate earlier and execute with fewer handoffs.
- Standardized governance across digital products: Implemented clearer governance that sets standards for how UX patterns, components and experience decisions are managed to ensure consistency, quality, and scalability across multi-tenant environments.
- Enabled scalable multi-tenant experience management: Designed the platform so teams could more efficiently customize their tenant while maintaining unified experience architecture.
THE IMPACT
Reduced rework, improved efficiency, and more capacity to deliver consistent member digital experiences at scale
Early rollout results showed improvements across both delivery performance and member-facing experience. Teams reduced rework, reused design assets more consistently, and increased their ability to deliver at scale.
Learn how UST helps healthcare organizations transform digital experiences through platform-led UX and scalable operating models.