From payer to care orchestrator: redesigning the service model of a leading health insurer

Executive context & strategic mandate

Organisational context

My role: Service Design Lead, working within a multidisciplinary team of designers and innovation consultants, responsible for end-to-end design and validation of a new coordinated care model and supporting digital platform.

Trigger for the work: structural pressures on the traditional insurance model, including unsustainable cost growth, increasing service fragmentation, and shifting user expectations toward preventive, continuous, and digitally enabled healthcare experiences—requiring a fundamental redesign of the insurer’s role within the healthcare ecosystem.

The work focused on the design and validation of a coordinated care service model and digital platform, enabling collaboration between patients, physicians, and the insurer around preventive, continuous, and data-informed healthcare delivery. This included defining service architecture, digital journeys, and engagement models to support a shift from reactive reimbursement to proactive health coordination.

A leading private health insurer in Latin America operating within a traditionally transactional healthcare system, where insurers act primarily as intermediaries between patients and providers—authorising procedures and reimbursing costs. This model has historically contributed to fragmented care delivery, limited continuity across patient journeys, and low system-wide visibility. In response to rising healthcare costs, accelerating demand for digital services, and growing expectations for preventive and personalised care, the organisation sought to reposition itself as a proactive coordinator of health and wellbeing through a digitally enabled, integrated care ecosystem.

Current ecosystem overview

The organisation planned to introduce a coordinated care model supported by a customised digital platform built on a healthcare CRM infrastructure.

Key challenge

Success depended on physician adoption, which required validating both the service model and the digital interface with medical professionals.

Healthcare delivery involved a complex ecosystem of stakeholders:

  • Patients / policyholders
  • Physicians across multiple specialties
  • Hospitals and clinics
  • Laboratories
  • Insurance brokers
  • Internal clinical and operational teams

Despite a large network of providers and millions of policyholders, the system suffered from structural challenges:

  • limited coordination between doctors
  • fragmented medical information
  • duplicated diagnostics
  • little preventive care monitoring
  • limited digital integration across the ecosystem

Research approach

A multi-layered discovery phase was conducted to understand both the healthcare ecosystem and the motivations of key stakeholders.

Research activities

  • desk research and social listening
  • internal operational data analysis
  • technology and platform capability analysis
  • international healthcare benchmarks
  • internal stakeholder interviews
  • external interviews with physicians and clinic staff
  • observational research and shadowing

Profiles interviewed

  • senior executives
  • internal healthcare specialists
  • clinic administrators
  • physicians from 15 specialties

Key insights

around trust, clinical visibility, workflow diversity, and differential physician readiness for coordinated care models.

Trust and data security were critical barriers.

Physicians were highly concerned about medical data privacy and the security of patient information within digital systems.

Physicians needed full visibility of patient history.

Doctors wanted integrated access to medical records, lab results, and treatment history to deliver coordinated care.

Physician workflows vary widely.

Different career stages, practice models, and levels of digital maturity required tailored engagement strategies.

Surgeons showed the strongest openness to the new model.

Specialists who depended heavily on referrals were more receptive to coordination systems.

Opportunity areas & future service vision

Coordinated care model recommendations

The research identified three strategic directions to reimagine healthcare delivery around coordination, prevention, and physician-centric digital enablement.

Coordinated Care Ecosystem

Enable collaboration between physicians through shared patient visibility and structured referral pathways.

Preventive Health Management

Shift the insurer's role from reactive reimbursement to proactive health monitoring and prevention.

Physician-Centric Platform
Digital environment that integrates clinical information, lab results, and patient data in one interface.

The new coordinated care model positioned the insurer as a health and wellbeing orchestrator, connecting patients, physicians, and healthcare services.

The vision included:

  • A digital platform enabling physicians to access patient information.
  • Integration with laboratory results and medical records.
  • Coordinated care pathways across specialties.
  • Improved patient follow-up before, during, and after consultations.

Three distinct physician service blueprints were designed to reflect different medical practice models:

  • clinicians
  • hybrid specialists
  • surgical specialists

Each blueprint mapped the complete healthcare experience, highlighting opportunities for coordination, digital support, and improved patient outcomes.

Prototyping & co-creation

Physicians were actively involved throughout the design process. Co-creation sessions and prototype testing allowed the team to validate both the service model and the digital interface.

Activities included

  • generative workshops with physicians
  • platform feature prioritisation
  • journey walkthroughs
  • interface validation sessions
  • rapid prototype testing

Iterative design approach

Helped refine both:

  • the platform information architecture and
  • the service communication strategy required to onboard doctors.

Implementation & transformation

Insights from research and co-creation informed both:

  • the digital platform customisation and
  • the engagement strategy required to scale the coordinated care model.

Key outputs included:

  • physician personas and adoption strategies
  • service blueprints for different medical profiles
  • platform requirements and user flows
  • communication guidelines for physician engagement
  • validated specifications for platform development
These outputs ensured that the digital platform could be implemented with high precision and strong physician adoption.