Physicians Health Plan
- UX Design
- Content Strategy
- Web Development
Health Insurance Made PHP Easy
Working with Physicians Health Plan (PHP) to develop their new website was a groundbreaking opportunity for us at Reusser. As a team, we immersed ourselves in the health insurance industry becoming familiar with all of the acronyms and lingo necessary to give us a full understanding of our client’s product. We coupled this with an innovative new journey-based approach that resulted in a 100% user-focused design with a friendly and PHP Easy tone.
Everyone Has a Story: Get to Know Our Client
Physicians Health Plan (PHP) is a physician-sponsored, not-for-profit health insurance company headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana. PHP offers a wide variety of health insurance options for small and large businesses alike. Their products range from new self-funded plans to more traditional HMO and POS plans. They also offer supplemental plans for dental, vision, pharmacy, life & disability insurance, and more—all with the added benefit of local customer service and product decision making.
For their new website, PHP wanted to completely reinvent the way they presented their company in the digital sphere. Their tagline was PHP Easy, but their website was confusing and difficult to navigate—a far cry from the PHP Easy slogan they claimed. To create their new website, we partnered with both PHP’s marketing team and information technology team. The process involved spending multiple days on-site at PHP conducting focus groups with various departments in order to have a successful knowledge transfer. Those on-site multi-day meetings were then followed up by subsequent weekly meetings with the PHP team to make sure that our strategy and design remained on target throughout the project.
Our Detailed Process
Like many of our clients, Physicians Health Plan (PHP) came to us frustrated with their existing SiteFinity CMS. They were looking for a better content management solution and looking to convey a clear message to their users. They knew they needed a web development firm with a strong emphasis on user experience design and content strategy, and that’s why they chose Reusser.
Health insurance is a complex product requiring a unique depth of understanding. Our entire project team was engaged in the project from start to finish learning as much as we could about health insurance so that we could truly talk the talk with both PHP’s internal team and the external public. We felt it was important to understand all of the details ourselves before we could effectively simplify and communicate that information to the end user in a “PHP Easy” way.
"Reusser committed to thoroughly understanding PHP’s products and services, ultimately translating critical plan details so our members could easily understand the basics of health insurance."
HOW WE OVERCAME OBSTACLES
We knew from the start that we wanted to embrace a new form of journey-based design for PHP’s new website. This required us to rework many of our internal processes and client-facing documents and wireframes to fit with this new style of design. The idea of creating a journey forced us to throw out all of our standard protocols and come up with new and fresh ways to present our strategies and designs. Even something as simple as a site hierarchy had to take on a new form, and we were stretched as a team to come up with new and innovative solutions at every turn.
Our other daunting task for this particular project was the new Find a Plan feature that we desperately wanted to implement as part of the PHP Easy theme. Our goal was to take some of the guesswork out of health insurance by asking users a few simple questions and then presenting them with the type of health insurance that would be the best fit for them based upon their responses. Developing the logic for this decision tree was a massive undertaking which required patience, precision, and detailed knowledge about all of PHP’s different health insurance products.
"The Reusser team brings a decidedly left-brain component and takes it to the next level by applying a sincere understanding of user experience. By grasping our end goals and focusing on brand consistency, Reusser was able to project our company’s essence through creative concept and information architecture."
Delivering Innovative Solutions
All of our time and effort was rewarded with the launch of PHP’s new user-friendly website. The end result of all the user flow research, rapid prototyping, content strategy, and journey-based UX design was a stellar website that we feel truly stands out in the health insurance industry. The Find a Plan feature adds a unique and user-friendly touch, and the overall feeling of the website has been transformed from dry and confusing to exciting and fresh.
The project also allowed us the opportunity to work with PHP’s internal developers to improve their critical Provider Search functionality by developing a custom API layer that allowed us to interact with internal enterprise systems to help control the display of search results.
We also enjoyed getting to work alongside PHP’s marketing team to assist with photo direction as we tied in the local Fort Wayne community to the website through photoshoots at well-known Fort Wayne landmarks and clients of PHP.
All in all, we couldn’t have been more pleased with the end result, and we look forward to our continued partnership with Physicians Health Plan. Moving forward we will be working on revamping their member portal to match the messaging and ease of use of the public-facing website to give a seamless PHP Easy experience.
