Designing a Digital Front Door for a New Healthcare Network

Leading discovery and experience architecture for Canopy Health — a new Bay Area ACO spanning UCSF Health and John Muir Health.

Role: UX Lead Domain: Consumer Health & Digital Platforms Timeline: Jan–May (Discovery & Architecture in Q1; Design & Handoff in Q2)

On this page

Canopy Health consumer portal — showing the provider search interface and member portal entry point across a Bay Area healthcare network — Illustration I made to illustrate the Canopy network.

This project required more than designing a healthcare portal. It required defining a coherent patient experience before the underlying network infrastructure fully existed:

Framing Reframed the challenge from portal design to experience architecture — establishing how patients would understand, enter, and navigate a newly formed healthcare network.
Discovery Grounded design decisions in structured research on patient behaviors, provider search patterns, and insurance comprehension — before a single screen was designed.
Architecture Mapped the core patient journeys across multiple backend systems — identity, eligibility, provider directories — creating a stable experience model that could absorb evolving infrastructure.
Entry Points Designed the primary interfaces through which patients would encounter the network: the public website, provider discovery, and member portal access.

Context

A New Healthcare Network Taking Shape

In 2016, UCSF Health and John Muir Health initiated an affiliation to form a Bay Area–wide accountable care organization, later branded as Canopy Health. The ambition was significant: create a unified digital entry point capable of connecting patients to services across organizations while leveraging existing EMR systems.

At the time, the underlying ecosystem was still evolving. Provider directories, eligibility data, benefits information, and clinical services lived across different systems and organizations. The digital experience therefore needed to define a coherent way for patients to understand and navigate the network before its operational infrastructure was fully unified.

I was asked to lead the discovery and architectural definition of the new consumer experience — establishing how patients would enter the ecosystem, find providers, understand coverage, and access services across institutions.

Without a clear experience framework, the platform risked amplifying the complexity of the underlying healthcare systems rather than resolving it.

Defining a New Network for Patients

Canopy Health represented a new collaboration between healthcare organizations. The digital experience needed to explain what the network was, how it related to existing providers, and how patients should navigate care within it.

Provider Discovery Across Institutions

Patients needed a reliable way to find in-network providers across multiple health systems. Existing directory experiences were fragmented and data quality varied across sources.

Translating Insurance Complexity

Benefits, eligibility, and coverage information originated from insurance systems designed for administrative use. The challenge was translating these structures into interfaces patients could easily understand.

Designing Ahead of System Integration

Many of the underlying systems supporting provider data, eligibility, and member services were still evolving. The experience architecture needed to remain stable even as backend infrastructure continued to mature.

Audience ecosystem map showing the relationships between consumers, employers, hospitals (UCSF Health and John Muir Health), and insurers within the Canopy Health network — Canopy Health audience ecosystem — consumers, employers, hospitals, and insurers within a newly formed Bay Area network

Strategy

Establishing the Experience Architecture

In the first quarter, the work focused on defining the experience architecture—understanding patient needs, mapping cross-system journeys, and establishing the foundational logic for how the network would be experienced.

The discovery phase focused on clarifying patient expectations, provider discovery patterns, insurance concepts, enrollment models, and identity verification processes. By synthesizing research insights with input from business and technical teams, the work shifted from individual features to defining the core journeys that would structure the portal experience.

Understanding the Ecosystem

The first priority was understanding how patients conceptualize care access within a network spanning multiple organizations. Discovery work explored patient expectations, provider search behaviors, insurance terminology, and account enrollment processes. Mapping these elements early helped clarify where confusion typically occurs — particularly around eligibility, provider networks, and coverage visibility.

Architecting the Journeys

Once discovery insights were consolidated with technical and operational constraints, the next step was defining the core user journeys structuring the portal. Flow diagrams for account creation, identity verification, provider discovery, appointment access, and cost visibility helped validate how multiple backend systems would integrate within a coherent experience.

Designing the Entry Points

With system interactions defined, the final step was translating the architecture into concrete interaction designs. Early mockups focused on the most important entry points: the website, login experience, and provider search interface — establishing the primary pathways through which patients would discover providers and access services.

Experience Strategy diagram showing three sequential steps across Q1–Q3: Step 1 Understanding the Ecosystem (patient expectations, stakeholder interviews, insurance concepts, enrollment models, identity verification), Step 2 Architecting the Journeys (task model, UX architecture, system mapping, user journey), and Step 3 Designing the Entry Points (website and login, provider search UI, appointment access), followed by handoff to agency — A simplified view of the strategy process used to translate ecosystem research into a coherent portal architecture

Execution

From Strategy to Structured Journeys

Each strategic principle shaped a distinct phase of the project — from discovery research to experience architecture, and finally to the design of the platform's primary entry points.

1. Understanding the Ecosystem

Before defining the portal experience, the first priority was understanding how patients navigate healthcare networks and insurance systems. Discovery focused on how patients choose providers, what information they expect from healthcare portals, how insurance concepts influence care decisions, and what causes confusion around coverage and benefits.

The research program combined stakeholder interviews, hypothesis-driven research sessions, and usability reviews of existing healthcare portals. Early work also mapped the broader ecosystem of stakeholders interacting with the Canopy network — including consumers, employers, hospitals, and insurers — clarifying how the consumer portal needed to function as an entry point within a larger healthcare system.

Assumptions and hypotheses slide — structured research framing around patient behaviors, portal usage patterns, and provider search — Hypothesis-driven research framing — assumptions around patient portal behaviors, provider search, and insurance comprehension

Key Research Insights

Research synthesis revealed several recurring patterns that shaped the experience priorities:

Passive Portal Usage

Patients rarely visit healthcare portals proactively — entry is typically triggered by a specific need, making first-time clarity critical.

Provider Choice Drives Enrollment

Provider availability strongly influences insurance plan selection — making provider discovery a primary driver, not a secondary feature.

Insurance Terminology Barriers

Insurance terminology creates confusion for many users — the portal needed to translate administrative concepts into plain patient language.

Cost as a Care Decision Factor

Cost visibility plays a major role in care decisions — transparency around coverage and out-of-pocket costs was a key patient need.

Research insights slide — usability findings covering patient portal behaviors, provider search patterns, and insurance comprehension themes — Research synthesis — key insights from patient interviews and usability sessions informing the portal's experience priorities

2. Architecting the Journeys

To translate the ecosystem insights into a coherent experience, the next step was defining how patients would move through the portal. Because the platform needed to connect services across multiple healthcare organizations and backend systems, the experience architecture had to account for identity services, clinical records, provider networks, and billing platforms. Working closely with Product and Engineering, I mapped the key user journeys and evaluated how different systems would need to interact to support them.

Task Model

The task model captures the goals patients are trying to accomplish and the activities they expect to perform across the portal. By mapping how these tasks relate to one another, it provides a structural view of the experience and helps ensure that key workflows remain coherent as multiple systems are integrated behind the scenes. The model also serves as a living reference for the team, evolving as new insights emerge during research and implementation. In total, more than 18 core journeys were mapped across the platform; the diagram below illustrates a representative subset.

System Journeys

Once the behavioral structure was established, the next step was translating those activities into system interaction journeys. These flows detail the specific paths a user follows to complete a task and how the portal coordinates interactions across identity services, clinical systems, and partner platforms. Unlike the task model, which represents user goals, these journeys describe the operational steps required to support them. Mapping these interactions helped the team evaluate implementation options, identify integration dependencies, and align on how the system should respond to real user behavior.

3. Designing the First Experience

In the second quarter, as the system interactions became clearer, the work shifted toward shaping how patients would first engage with the portal—defining key areas that could help users orient themselves and begin navigating the experience. Capturing this initial moment was critical. Early concepts explored different ways to introduce patients to a network that did not yet exist as a unified system.

The focus was on defining a coherent starting point—organizing the information patients needed most and bringing together clinical data, insurance coverage, and services into a single, understandable experience. These early explorations reflect different ways of structuring the experience—each emphasizing a distinct approach to helping patients orient themselves within the portal.

Option A: Benefits-Centered Dashboard

This concept explored a benefits-first entry point, positioning insurance coverage as the primary anchor for the experience. The layout emphasized a modular dashboard where patients could access services— appointments, messages, medications—through independent widgets, while surfacing alerts and system updates alongside core plan information.

Option A concept — benefits-centered dashboard with modular widgets and plan information

Option B: Integrated Clinical + Plan Experience

This direction focused on creating a unified experience across clinical and insurance systems. It introduced the idea of connecting external medical records (e.g., UCSF, John Muir Health) into a single interface, supported by status indicators, onboarding tasks, and guided actions to help patients establish their data connections.

Option B concept — integrated clinical and plan experience with onboarding tasks and linked records

Option C: Service-Oriented Experience Hub

This concept explored a more service-driven model, organizing the experience around care activities such as appointments, billing, and health records. The interface emphasized direct access to providers and services, with persistent navigation and structured sections designed to support ongoing engagement over time.

Option C concept — service-oriented experience hub with persistent navigation and structured care sections

Interface Design

Bringing the Experience to Life

With the key journeys and entry points defined, the final phase focused on translating the experience architecture into a cohesive visual language for the Canopy Health digital presence. The work centered on establishing a consistent design system and interaction model across key touchpoints—website and portal—allowing users to move through a complex healthcare network with clarity and confidence.

Website Experience

The public-facing website was designed to help patients understand the network and quickly find relevant providers. Search, filtering, and availability were brought together into a single, structured flow that reduces friction between intent (“I need care”) and action (“book an appointment”).

Canopy Health website UI — responsive homepage, provider search, and member portal entry point — Canopy Health website — Homepage, Provider search, Audience areas.

Registration & Access

The experience needed to support secure access to personal health information. Registration, login, and recovery flows were designed as a connected system—balancing verification requirements with clarity, guidance, and progressive disclosure.

By the end of Q2, the work was consolidated into final designs, flows, and specifications, and handed off to an external agency for implementation—ensuring continuity while enabling the broader system to mature.

End-to-end account access flows including registration, login, username recovery, and password reset.

Reflection

Designing Before the Infrastructure Converged

Large healthcare ecosystems rarely evolve in a single step. Platforms, provider networks, and insurance infrastructure often mature at different speeds. The most important contribution of this project was not a single interface or feature, but the experience architecture that allowed the network to present a clear and coherent face to patients while its underlying systems continued to evolve.

Discovery-First

Research and journey mapping preceded interface design — establishing shared alignment across product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

2 Core Entry Points

Public website, and member portal access — designed as a coherent system, not isolated features.

Multi-System Integration

Experience flows mapped across identity, eligibility, provider directory, and scheduling systems — creating a stable architecture ahead of full backend convergence.

Phased Delivery (Q1–Q2)

(Jan–Mar): Discovery & Experience Architecture
(Apr–May): Product Flows, Website & Handoff

By starting with discovery and defining the core journeys first, the design work created a stable framework that engineering teams could build upon over time. This approach—clarifying the experience before the systems fully converge—has remained a guiding principle in much of my work on complex platforms.

“Clarity starts with people—understanding them is what makes meaningful experiences possible.”

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