Quality Payment Program (qpp.cms.gov)
The Challenge: New legislation is prompting widespread policy changes across Medicare's incentive programs for health care providers. These providers need to understand the coming changes and the ways they can participate.
I joined the project team shortly after the bill establishing the Quality Payment Program was signed into law. The new program presented a significant shift from the existing payment system, and providers understandably had a lot of questions about how they would be affected. It was immediately apparent that they needed a central place where they could get answers.
Our team contained representatives from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), the United States Digital Service (USDS), and Northrop Grumman. We worked together to interpret the legislation, discover which pieces were most critical to the affected audience, and design solutions for presenting that information in a way that could be easily understood. I worked with stakeholders and business analysts to define the requirements, created both low and high fidelity design concepts and interactive prototypes, participated in user research and usability testing sessions, created style guides and visual design specifications, and worked with developers to insure that the final product matched the design.
The initial concept for the website was mainly informational, but as we talked with users and got a better feel for the challenges involved in understanding the new legislation a more ambitious vision emerged. We ended up designing and building an interactive tool allowing providers to browse and select from the different reporting measures availabile to better understand the impact of their participation decisions. All of the designs went through extensive usability testing, resulting in a clear, usable and useful resource for health care providers across the United States.
