Athenahealth
Director of Experience Design, Chennai.
Insurance Posting Engine
Led a 12-member Product Design team, including a Design Manager, driving the design strategy, product vision, and UX direction for athenaCollector, athenahealth’s cloud-based revenue cycle and practice management platform.
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Established design direction across complex healthcare revenue-cycle and practice-management workflows.
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Partnered closely with US-based Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders to align product strategy and execution across geographies.
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Led on-site user research in Boston, bringing direct customer insights into product strategy and experience design.
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Built alignment between the India design organization and US product teams, creating a cohesive global product design practice.
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Translated complex operational workflows into simpler, scalable, and user-centered experiences for healthcare providers and staff.
Product Status & Customer Feedback
athenaCollector was a mature revenue-cycle management platform, but customer feedback highlighted significant claim-posting quality and technology limitations. The product had been evolving for nearly two decades, creating accumulated complexity and gaps in newer reimbursement models.
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Claim Posting Quality: Poor posting quality was associated with approximately 25% of customer support cases, making it a significant operational pain point.
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Customer Attrition Risk: Posting issues emerged as the #1 concern in Voice of Customer feedback, directly impacting customer satisfaction and retention.
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Legacy Technology: Built over nearly 20 years, the product had accumulated layers of functionality and code, resulting in a complex and ageing technology foundation.
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Workflow Complexity: Existing workflows made it difficult for users to identify, understand, and resolve posting issues efficiently.
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Product Capability Gaps: The platform had limited support for evolving reimbursement models, including fee-for-service workflows and alternative payment models (APMs).
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Business Impact: The combination of posting errors, workflow complexity, and capability gaps created operational overhead for customers and increased the risk of customer churn.
Design Challenge: Modernize a mission-critical legacy workflow while improving posting accuracy, usability, efficiency, and support for evolving healthcare payment models.
Problem Statement
Provider organizations need to capture, reconcile, and accurately post payments and remittance information from insurance payers and patients, while keeping accounts receivable (AR) up to date.
However, the existing payment-posting experience made this complex, error-prone, and time-consuming—contributing to poor posting quality and operational rework.
Design Challenges
The design challenge was to simplify and modernize the payment-posting workflow so that users can:
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Capture payment and remittance information from multiple sources.
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Match payments and remittance details to the correct claims and AR.
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Identify and resolve exceptions such as unmatched or incomplete payments.
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Record transactions accurately with minimal manual effort.
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Complete posting faster, reducing delays in the revenue cycle and improving cash-flow visibility.
How might we enable provider organizations to post payments accurately and efficiently, while reducing manual work, errors, and time-to-resolution?
This was particularly important because payment posting sits at the core of the revenue-cycle workflow: accurate matching and posting directly affects AR accuracy, downstream reconciliation, and timely revenue capture. athenahealth's current documentation similarly describes payment posting as including remittance detail, payment/adjustment amounts, and matching payments to their corresponding charges.
Research Strategy & Design Process
The research was structured as a multi-layered discovery program, combining internal data, domain knowledge, literature, and direct customer research to understand the current payment-posting ecosystem and define a future-state experience.
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Current-State Mapping: Mapped existing payment-posting workflows, systems, handoffs, pain points, exceptions, and operational dependencies to identify where errors and rework occurred.
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Data & Literature Analysis: Analysed customer cases, product data, Voice of Customer feedback, and industry research to identify recurring patterns and quantify key problems.
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Hypothesis & POV Development: Synthesised findings into hypotheses and preliminary Points of View (POVs) that could be tested with customers, SMEs, and internal stakeholders.
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Future-State Definition: Developed and visualised “To-Be” workflows focused on reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and moving toward exception-based payment posting.
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Payment Model Exploration: Investigated how the product could better support non-FFS and emerging payment models, including alternative reimbursement approaches.
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Technical Feasibility: Partnered with product and engineering teams to explore potential technical approaches and understand system constraints influencing the future experience.
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Jobs-to-be-Done: Identified 70+ Jobs to be Done across payment capture, reconciliation, posting, exception handling, and downstream AR workflows.
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Customer & BPO Research: Conducted site visits across Belfast, Boston, Rhode Island, and Chattanooga, along with a visit to the Chennai BPO centre, to observe real workflows and understand operational pain points firsthand.
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Validate with Customers & SMEs: Shared emerging concepts and To-Be processes with customers, domain experts, and internal SMEs to challenge assumptions and validate the proposed direction.
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Build Organizational Buy-in: Socialised research findings, POVs, and future-state workflows with Product, Engineering, Operations, and business stakeholders, creating alignment around the strategic direction before moving into detailed design.
Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
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JTBD was a core product strategy framework used across athenahealth projects.
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It shifts the focus from features to the customer’s underlying needs and goals.
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We identified the specific jobs customers were trying to accomplish.
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Mapped the desired outcomes and measures of success for each job.
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Identified unmet needs, pain points, and opportunities.
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Used JTBD to challenge assumptions and align teams around customer needs.
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Prioritised jobs based on customer impact and business value.
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For athenaCollector, we identified 70+ Jobs-to-be-Done across payment posting workflows.
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These jobs became the foundation for hypotheses, POVs, and future-state workflows.
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Ultimately, JTBD helped ensure we were solving the right customer problems—not simply adding features
User Task Analysis
Following extensive insights from site visits in Belfast, Boston, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, we conducted a collaborative task-analysis exercise with athenahealth SMEs and leadership teams.
I led the affinity mapping and synthesis exercise, bringing together customer observations, workflows, pain points, and business requirements to create a shared understanding of the payment-posting ecosystem.
Outputs
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High-level, Athena-agnostic payment-posting process flows documenting the end-to-end workflow.
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Preliminary AR models for non-FFS payment models.
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Identified initial POVs and opportunity areas to inform the future-state product strategy
Service Design Map
In parallel, we mapped the end-to-end user journey across the athenaCollector ecosystem to understand how payment posting fits into the broader revenue-cycle experience.
The service map helped us identify key user touchpoints, system interactions, handoffs, dependencies, and pain points across the journey, revealing where payment posting influences downstream workflows and the overall customer experience.
Improved New Posting Workflow
After mapping the end-to-end posting process and understanding the financial accounting rules behind insurance settlements, we redesigned the workflow to make payment posting more accurate, efficient, and easier to manage.
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Simplified the decision flow: Consolidated multiple posting decisions into a clearer sequence—from receiving remittance and eliminating duplicates to identifying the correct AR and recording the payment.
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Made AR the central anchor: Structured the workflow around whether the payment impacts AR, whether the correct AR can be identified, and whether it is still open.
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Separated standard and exception paths: Clearly distinguished normal posting from scenarios such as unidentified AR, closed AR, take-backs, refunds, write-offs, and follow-up.
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Improved line-level accuracy: Refined how payment, adjustment, transfer, and liability amounts are applied against individual claim/charge lines based on payer instructions and accounting rules.
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Reduced unnecessary manual work: Identified opportunities for automation and exception-based processing instead of requiring users to manually work every transaction.
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Designed for different payment models: The process was structured to accommodate more complex AR scenarios beyond traditional fee-for-service models.
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Created clearer handoffs: Connected remittance processing, payment posting, AR reconciliation, follow-up, and closure into one coherent end-to-end workflow.
The resulting model shifted posting from a complex, fragmented set of activities to a structured, exception-driven workflow, with the goal of increasing clean posting, reducing manual effort, and improving the accuracy of financial records. These goals directly aligned with the modernization charter defined for the initiative.
Design principle: Automate the predictable. Guide the complex. Surface the exceptions.
Improved Claim Summary page
These are some of the hands-on design that show improvement in the overall page layout and posting table
