Crowdfunding healthcare payments for over 10k families

The impact

I led design for the mobile and web apps that now crowdfund healthcare payments for over 10,000 families at Samaritan Ministries International, a high-trust community where members fund each other’s medical bills and share messages of support.

Balanced authentic connection with healthcare privacy

How might we let members connect authentically around deeply personal medical need, without compromising the privacy and legal constraints that govern healthcare data? As a health-sharing company, SMI is bound by rules that don’t apply to traditional insurers: members can’t auto-pay their monthly dues like a premium, they send support manually, and they can chat with those they’ve supported in the past. Together with a team of designers, engineers, and product managers, I led design research and helped craft the vision and early feature concepts for their flagship mobile app, built alongside a full web app in parallel, which added real coordination complexity across both teams.

Bet on making the payment feel human, not transactional

Rather than treat monthly dues as a simple bill to pay, I bet on designing the moment of giving itself: a swipe gesture, instead of a checkbox, built to make members pause, reflect, and empathize with the person they were supporting; a map experience that turned member connections into a small social network; and a private chat tied directly to the sharing workflow. Every downstream decision, from the information architecture to the taxonomy, was built to support that one relational core.

Role and responsibilities

• Strategic Product Designer & Analyst
• UX strategy
• Business analyst
• Concept development
• Visiontype creation
• UX research
• Prototype development

Beyond this project, I facilitated design sprints and North Star product workshops with C-suite executives and leadership teams across Anthroware’s client roster to establish clear design and product strategies, and helped standardize internal design processes as the team scaled.

Early Ideation & Co-creation Workshop: Early in the project, we sat down with members to better understand pain-points, jobs-to-be-done, insights, and opinions about their legacy platform.

Design Principles: Since we were dealing with personal healthcare data while also allowing members to connect with one another, I placed our design principles on a spectrum in order to determine where to strike the right balance.

Business Model Discovery: One new business opportunity I uncovered was the idea of a dedicated group-prayer feature that could be used as a standalone app for non-members interested in joining the community.

Remote Team Ideation: I led our team in multiple ideation sessions where we leveraged tools such as Invision’s Freehand to generate feature concepts that addressed key pain-points.

Early Information Architecture Diagram: While fleshing out an early IA diagram, I discovered an opportunity to connect the monthly sharing workflow with a private chat feature (micro-connection) and a global map view of all member connections (macro).

Detailed Sitemap: View of an early sitemap I created to help developers get a head start building known, essential parts of the app.

Sitemap (Zoom-in): I envisioned connecting the sharing workflow with the global map view that displayed all of a member’s respective connections as a way of humanizing the transactional aspect of the product experience.

Taxonomy: Members would be migrating from the legacy platform to the new mobile app, which presented a challenge and opportunity. This early taxonomy I outlined helped create a shared language with the team around the bill payment process.

Cross-Platform Notification Rules: This is an early diagram I created with SMI’s head of design and product manager to show the relationship between notifications (email and push) with different states in the bill management section of the app.

Parallel Confluence Structure: I spearheaded the creation of custom Confluence templates that captured both mobile and web design work to serve as a source of truth. This helped engineers on both sides (mobile and desktop) know where to find the latest design work for each sprint.

Adobe XD File Structure: I spearheaded the organization of web and mobile design work in Adobe XD Cloud. This image shows screens for bill management, one of the most complex and sensitive parts of the app.

Hi-fi Screens: Examples of some high-fidelity mobile screens used in an early release. Illustrations from the client’s creative department were used for the empty states.

Swipe-to-share Prototype: I worked with the team to iterate on the design of a swiping gesture to make the monthly payment less transactional and more human. The goal: to encourage members to pause, reflect, and empathize with the member before sending financial support.

Map Experience: I designed this map experience as a way of creating a mini social network within the product experience. Member connections appeared on the map screen, and clicking on a profile allowed members to chat with others and provide words of support as they navigated their healthcare journey.

Mark Balance Paid: Since members paid providers the remaining balance of their medical bills outside of the app, I designed and developed a workflow that allowed members to mark bills as fully paid. This system allowed members to track open and closed bills while also providing valuable backend user data for SMI.

Would want harder data on whether the swipe changed behavior

I designed the swipe-to-share gesture to make members pause and empathize before sending support, but I never got hard behavioral data on whether it actually changed how people gave compared to a simple button. I’d push harder for that kind of outcome measurement next time, rather than trusting the design intent alone.