Encouraging Prompt Medical Bill Payment

In the summer of 2023, I joined AthenaHealthA healthtech company serving 170K+ clinicians across the US as a UX Design Intern, working closely with design, product, engineering to develop a new platform within their healthcare software suite.

One of AthenaHealth’s core offerings is medical billing — enabling healthcare providers to charge for their services and allowing insurers and patients (payers) to make payments through its cloud-based system.

By 2023, the growing number of outstanding medical bills had become a pressing issue. As the company prepared to launch a dedicated billing portal, I explored ways to nudge payers toward more timely payments.

I focused on improving how the system guides payer actions at critical decision points — clarifying what to do, when, and why.

Color-coded status tags indicating invoice urgency[1]

Chat-based communication for faster claim resolution[2]

This includes highlighting invoice urgency to help users quickly identify pending or overdue bills[1] and introducing messenger for payment adjudication communication[2].

3 months wasn’t enough to ship and see the full impact of my work in such a complex, compliance-heavy domain like healthcare. However, after the portal launched in 2024 alongside other new features, AthenaHealth saw a 10 days of reduction in client payment cycles.

I'm genuinely grateful to my mentors at Athenahealth — Robert, Julie, and Marco — for their warm onboarding and thoughtful guidance throughout this project.