CARIN UX Guide

The Client

the CARIN Alliance is a bipartisan collaborative working to advance consumer-directed exchange of health information. In July of 2021, many healthcare payers—including most Medicaid and Medicare payers as well as many private insurers—were suddenly required to offer API access to a wide variety of customer claims, billing, and benefits data through the CARIN Blue Button program as a result of the 21st Century Cures Act and its Patient Access API requirement. These regulations opened up major opportunities for innovative consumer healthcare applications, while placing an additional burden on app developers to ensure that patient information is used responsibly and in the best interests of consumers.

My Process

This project began without a clear objective, with CARIN giving Arcweb the freedom to explore how we could create a digital asset to support their Blue Button program. Through extensive collaboration, information sorting, and user journey mapping, we uncovered that payers were struggling to understand the changes required by the 21st Century Cures Act. We also discovered that CARIN had developed a set of compliance requirements for payers, and meeting these requirements would earn them a spot on CARIN’s website as a recommended partner. Based on these insights, I concluded that CARIN needed a UX Guide—a simple, user-friendly resource that would help payers easily understand the requirements and provide actionable recommendations for implementation. I also created the concept of a CARIN badge, a way to make CARIN an industry gold standard and a way for payers to show off that they had complied.

Key Results

As we developed the UX Guide for payers and deepened our understanding of the industry, it became clear that app developers creating compliant healthcare apps would also benefit from a similar resource. I expanded the guide to include a dedicated section for developers, helping them ensure they properly educate patients on their rights. I included sections such as Voice and Style, which assists developers in translating complex, technical privacy policies into clear, user-friendly language and sleek UX. This empowers users to feel confident when sharing their data. To compliment the guide, I also designed a full example app that illustrates common consumer healthcare UX needs while adhering to the best practices outlined in the guide. The app's design files and assets are open-source and available for download, providing consumer app developers with a practical reference and a starting point for creating their own compliant applications.