Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Quality Payment Program (QPP)
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Center (CMS)
Quality Payment Program (QPP)
Electronically Prescribed Controlled Substances Program (EPCS)
Client:
Design Systems Design Lead
Senior Product Designer over seeing EPCS, Self Nominations and Targeted Review
Role(s):
Program Overview
CMS is committed to advancing health equity, expanding coverage, and improving health outcomes through initiatives like the Quality Payment Program (QPP). The QPP program helps shift away from a system of paying only for volume to a system that rewards value and outcomes.
QPP is part of CMS' efforts to create a high-value healthcare system that promotes quality, safety, equity, and accessibility, particularly for underserved communities. These programs aim to provide better care for individuals, improve population health, and reduce costs.
Project Background
The Challenge: Building design consistency and improve the end users experience within a complex multi-faceted program.
The program is highly complex with very critical and specific medical jargon paired with 7 different development teams and one HCD team we are tasked with managing consistency across the application.
As the design systems lead it is my responsibility to develop proper guidance and update the QPP Design System, a child system to the CMS DS, and oversee the design and development of updating and unifying the many facets of the application across development teams.
Additionally, I provide direct UX & UI support across 3 of these development teams to add and update feature enhancements to the EPCS program, as well as the Self Nomination and Targeted Review features of the QPP application.
“When none of us can understand the policy and what policy folks say was their intent doesn't line up with the words they wrote in the policy and we then ask ourselves why users can't understand it.....”
— HCD team member
To be able able to continue support on UI feature enhancements while managing the 8 different development application teams transition to a unified design system it was crucial to develop a robust timeline. I preformed a SWOT analysis during the roadmap development to also hhelp identify priorities and risks.
Discovery
Exploration
While evaluating the current state of the application and the design guidance, I reviewed the brand guides and began setting up tokens. At this time as the design lead I also supported and managed other Senior Designers while they gathered components for comparative analysis and reviewed the live site and development sites with our resource file to ensure that while doing our evaluations we were using accurate and up to date wireframes.
I sought out insights from team members that have more historical knowledge of the program and design decisions that were made with minimal documentation to provide reasoning and context when the QPP DS or CMS DS were not followed.
Component Analysis
After a robust review of the current state and identifying our key opportunities I mapped each individual design component in use across our program. I tracked how it was used, if it would need to be updated, changed to a web component, and if I needed to create guidance and documentation for consistent use.
Heuristic Evaluation
While reviewing the current state of the program my team and I identified which pages were managed by each development team, which pages could benefit from a static page layout template and where custom components were necessary to develop.
Design Token Updates
Once the framework was set up and key opportunities were identified, I was able to partner with the North Star Strategy team to create a new share repository and identify responsive semantic design tokens that could be used across all development teams.
Refinement
While slowly adapting to the new design system our team incrementally started to incorporate approved components in new design work along with adapting components to meet WCAG standards and program specific needs. Throughout this process I have still made minor adjustments and changes to continue to provide the best service to the end user even when there is not time scoped to fully redesign every stage of the user journey.
Impact
Overall this project has had a few challenges at a structural level, through those challenges I have found ways to make small and large wins. When I am on a team I bring people together in collaboration, workshops, and leading by example. While I was on this project I increased the coherence to accessibility standards, improved communication within the HCD design team and with our development partners as well as developing and documenting clear processes to provide much needed structure and efficiency to our design processes.
Research Lead, Sr Director of Research
I just had a 1:1 with our QPP Delivery Lead, who was reflecting on some of the changes within the team the past few months. Without me prompting, she shared how impressed she and the Product Manager have been with how strategically Kate is approaching their work, taking initiative, bringing big ideas, and proactively contributing to the team.
Program Director
