I designed a product nobody asked for. Then the company jumped in to build it.

Twenty years of design work came down to one meeting. I had not been asked for this. Nobody had. But I had seen the gap, designed the answer, and I was not going to wait for permission to show what the product could be.

Industry data painted a clear picture. Fewer than 10% of patient enrollments into manufacturer support programs were completed electronically. Average HCP portal engagement sat at 30-40% monthly logins. Nearly 60% of patients didn't even know support programs existed. The HCP Portal could have closed all three gaps, but it was deprioritized because it seemed to be working fine.

The legacy portal had been functional for years, and functional was the problem. It worked well enough that nobody questioned whether it could work better. But when I looked at it through the lens of what it could be doing for the business, the gaps were everywhere.

The portal wasn't just outdated visually. It was leaving revenue on the table, hiding critical patient information behind unnecessary navigation, and ignoring entire user personas who needed the platform as much as the providers did. The question wasn't whether to redesign it. It was whether anyone had the conviction to push for it against a backlog of other priorities.

The design work didn't start in February 2024. The research did. For nearly two years prior, I had been collecting and maintaining a running log of provider feedback, specific friction points, workflow requests, and unmet needs gathered through support channels, call scripts, and direct observation. By the time I started designing Portal 2.0, I had a detailed picture of what providers actually needed. The most consistent theme in the data was visibility. Providers needed to know, at a glance, when action was required of them on a pending request. That single insight shaped the information architecture of Portal 2.0 from its first wireframe to its final implementation.

Before I designed anything else, I spent time observing how they accessed patient data, managed enrollments, and navigated around the system's constraints. This grounded the design in how providers actually work, not in idealized workflows that exist only in documentation.

I ran workshops built around three core questions. What are providers trying to accomplish? What's blocking them? What would unblock them? I made sure people felt safe being candid, because honest feedback beats polished assumptions. I documented what we knew for certain and what remained open questions, making ambiguity visible rather than letting it derail decisions downstream.

Then I mapped workflows for each role, including admins, nurses, billing specialists, and front desk staff. Each had different needs and different pain points, based on the feedback. I documented the step-by-step processes each role follows, identified where navigation was creating unnecessary friction, and built an information architecture that keeps related information visible together. Every decision tied back to something we observed, a gap we identified, or feedback we heard directly from providers.

I didn't write a proposal. I didn't request a roadmap slot. I designed my vision for the future and set up a meeting.

I designed HCP Portal 2.0 as a unified workspace where providers could see every patient's journey in one view. Instead of jumping between screens for enrollments, benefit checks, prior auth requests, and copay programs, everything lived in one place, searchable and actionable.

In February 2024, I presented it to the Director of Product Management for Enterprise Solutions. The response wasn't polite interest or a backlog slot. It was immediate action. Within weeks, I was presenting to executive leadership. By March, they pulled me directly into sales workshops with enterprise pharmaceutical clients. Within six months, the product had moved from a self-initiated redesign to the company's top development priority.

In May 2024, leadership added Product Owner to my scope alongside my design lead role. The HCP Portal is a shared platform product, which means ownership doesn't align to a single delivery team. Every feature added to the portal has to find its place across the CRM implementations each team is responsible for. That cross-team scope, combined with holding the design vision, meant I could make decisions that aligned across both without the translation gaps that slow most product teams down.

Development began in June 2024. In August 2024, the dual role became Design Leader and Product Owner simultaneously, with UX accountability across the full product portfolio. That same month, I brought on a design team to own the detailed UI work and was running client workshops with enterprise pharmaceutical teams to validate the portal's information architecture and workflows in real time. Formalizing the dual role freed me to direct design execution, manage the distributed team, and drive product strategy without splitting focus between two half-roles.

I made strategic personnel decisions on the design team along the way, bringing in people who could grow the vision with us. I invested in the people who would raise the bar, not just fill the seats.

The design team operates independently and with real ownership throughout all projects. When an unauthenticated enrollment pathway was needed for a program, I handed the team the initiative brief and stepped back. They navigated feedback from three distinct user personas. The HCP, the specialty pharmacist, and the patient each brought different needs and constraints. They worked through multiple rounds of business-directed pivots, iterated independently, and presented the final design directly to me and the PM. I wasn't in the room for every decision. That was the point and the level at which I work with them.

The new platform was built from the ground up to handle enterprise-scale operations, meeting healthcare data requirements, supporting multiple client types, and designed to scale across pharmaceutical brands.

The first enterprise pharmaceutical client launched in June 2025. Their go-live validated that the platform could handle enterprise-scale complexity. When they launched, the cross-team coordination phase also completed and each development team returned to their own product roadmaps.

Before February 2024, the HCP Portal was deprioritized infrastructure. After it, the portal became the company's flagship product. What had been overlooked was now the highest-priority initiative, built from the ground up as an entirely new platform. That level of investment wasn't driven by a mandate. It was earned.

The first client launched in June 2025. But the product decisions made in 2024 were designed to carry further than one client and one CRM.

The instinct that drove this work did not start at CareMetx. It started in a marketing agency in Colorado, where I first learned what it meant to see what an organization was leaving on the table.