Streamlining the Healthcare Financing Journey

This healthcare financing company’s fragmented digital experience stalled growth. A user-centric partnership revitalized their platform.

Design

UI/UX Design, Design Strategy, Prototyping
Client

CareCredit
Role

Design Director
Year

2015-2020

Open Project

Case Study

Overview

CareCredit, a Synchrony-owned healthcare financing platform, helps patients and pet owners finance their healthcare expenses while equipping providers and health systems with tools that streamline operations and support patient satisfaction.

As the platform expanded rapidly, however, user experiences became increasingly fragmented across web, mobile, and internal systems. Healthcare providers encountered unclear communications and cumbersome workflows, while patients struggled to navigate their financing options effectively.

EY was initially engaged for a UX research pilot on the Provider Dashboard, where I served as Design Director and uncovered systemic issues in messaging consistency, workflow integration, and user understanding throughout the platform. This foundational work secured a long-term strategic partnership.

Over the following five years, I led UX design strategy for CareCredit, working across patient, provider, and health system experiences to develop clearer communications, streamline operational tools, and strengthen engagement platform-wide.

Challenge & Approach

Despite CareCredit’s strong market position, fragmented digital tools created friction for users and limited scalability. Key challenges included users’ difficulty understanding financing limits and eligibility, navigating the provider network, and completing applications efficiently. High support volumes and low engagement indicated fundamental gaps in trust, communication clarity, and workflow design.

As Design Director, I led cross-functional teams through comprehensive research with consumers, providers, and health systems to reimagine core journeys. Our strategy combined competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, and user testing to create clearer communications around complex healthcare financing while building trust through transparent, secure experiences.

SERVICES

+ Design Strategy
+ Competitive Analysis
+ Comparative Analysis
+ Heuristic Review
+ Prototyping
+ Wireframes
+ High Fidelity Design
+ UX Research
+ Usability Testing
+ Workshop Design
+ Motion Studies

Key Results

Patient Trust and Access: Clarified financing options, eligibility criteria, and application flows while improving transparency in communications. These updates supported more than $22 million in daily credit approvals and helped ensure that patients could access needed care—with 42% of cardholders reporting they would have postponed or declined recommended treatment without CareCredit financing options.

Provider and Health System Experience: Redesigned and consolidated dashboards and workflows for onboarding, transaction tracking, revenue monitoring, and multi-location management. These changes improved operational efficiency and reduced support inquiries across practice types.

Platform Performance: Redesigned the Provider Locator to better serve more than 1 million monthly searches, introducing distance-based sorting, richer profiles, and intuitive filtering while reducing user friction and improving provider visibility. Enhanced global navigation and information architecture to enable clear role distinction and confident content discovery across patient, provider, and health system audiences, while improving accessibility and inclusivity. These changes drove gains in engagement, trust, and task completion rates.

Process Innovation: Introduced rapid prototyping, design thinking practices, and cross-functional collaboration models to improve team alignment and delivery. Developed scalable, cross-audience frameworks for content creation, governance, and measurement, embedding user-centered practices throughout CareCredit.

Brand Enhancement: Elevated CareCredit’s brand as a modern, customer-centric, and trusted partner in healthcare financing, visible in platform consistency and messaging clarity.

Strategic Partnership Growth: Grew EY’s engagement from an initial $100,000 pilot to a $3 million annual partnership, demonstrating CareCredit’s recognition of the strategic value of our embedded, user-centered design partnership.

Impact

Our collaborative work helped reduce friction, strengthen user confidence, and streamline key workflows across the platform—contributing to better outcomes for both patients and providers.

This work transformed CareCredit from fragmented tools into a unified, research-driven platform that now serves millions of users with clearer digital pathways while reducing administrative burden for healthcare providers. By aligning communications and workflows with specific audience needs, we supported both timely care access and operational performance at scale.

The project demonstrates how thoughtful digital engagement and clear communication strategy can drive measurable outcomes in healthcare—helping providers deliver care more effectively while ensuring patients understand their options during moments of financial and medical uncertainty.

Examples of CareCredit Digital work