Consumer-facing
Empower users to proactively search medication prices before receiving a prescription, enhancing cost transparency and building trust.
About Rightway
Rightway signs contract with clients, and provides pharmacy coverage plans for client’s employees.
Rightway negotiates with drug manufacturers and pharmacies to control prescription spending.
Jump to Deliverable
Problem
Members feel unsure about their prescription costs.
When members visit a doctor, they leave with a prescription—but not a price. Doctors often have no insight into medication costs, leaving members to find out at the pharmacy. If the price is too high, they face a frustrating cycle of back-and-forth calls and re-prescriptions to find an affordable alternative.
However, our current solution, formulary, is not helpful enough.
Formulary is an online handbook that listed all covered medications and the tiers, but not exact prices. Plus, jargon-heavy language adds complexity. As a result, our pharmacists team received overwhelming chats about price and coverage info, causing low operation efficiency.
How about designing a medication pricing search feature?
We assume that if we introduce a proactive drug search feature, users will be able to know the price before getting a prescription. We interviewed with 20 Rightway members and validated this concept.
We aim to empower users with transparent pricing and seamless search.
I mapped out the user flow after collaborating with developers to understand the backend process and discussing pricing logic with PMs. When brainstorming potential solutions, I identified two key challenges that required deeper exploration.
Design Challenge #1
What blocks people from choosing generic option?
Generic medications offer the same effectiveness and safety as brand-name drugs but at a significantly lower cost.
Can we just display the price difference upfront?
Initially, I had a simple idea: Can we display the price difference directly on the initial search screen? After consulting with developers, I learned that this wasn’t feasible.
Explore other design options.
I invited 11 users for an unmoderated session to test prototype usability and gather their preferences.
Improved option 3
Did this design actually increase cost saving?
After launching the alternative medication recommendation flow, the team observed significant changes that drove cost savings for both members and clients.
Design Challenge #2
Why does selecting a preferred pharmacy in the drug search flow matters?
The preferred pharmacy is where doctors will automatically send prescriptions.
Drug search is the first interaction for most users, and they may not have set up a location elsewhere.
We made a mistake by jumping to a solution too quickly.
The team initially assumed that after selecting dosage, form, and other details, users would naturally want to add their preferred pharmacy before viewing prices. And returning users would be able to skip this step and go directly to the price results.
This could because of:
In densely populated areas, the result list can become overwhelming.
Mail-order pharmacies are not tied to any zip code.
Is a preferred pharmacy really "required"?
I began wondering—what if we made selecting a preferred pharmacy optional and allowed users to add multiple favorites after viewing prices? This would let users access price information faster while still highlighting favorite pharmacy on top for easy selection.
Deliverable
Impact
Feature adoption rate increased by over x3 compared to the previous month post-launch.
Users shared positive reviews, highlighting their appreciation for cost savings.
