Every reviewer spent 15 hours on one application. Multiply that by 16.
Project
DHCS County Portal and AI Review Insights
Client
California Department of Healthcare Services
My Role
Senior Product Designer and Researcher
Timeline
Results
2 years
15 → 8 hours, individual reviewer time per application
Hundreds of hours saved per application across the full review team
150,000+ Californians served through the program
The Integrated Plan landing page, where counties track section-by-section progress before submitting a draft.
The Challenge
In 2024, California passed Proposition 1, part of the Behavioral Health Services Act, funding mental health treatment, substance use disorder services, and supportive housing for people facing homelessness. To receive that funding, every county submits a three-year Integrated Plan (IP), a lengthy application covering funding requests, program strategy, and detailed narrative justifications for how the money will be used. Before this platform, the entire process was paper-based. My job was to design the system both sides would use: counties submitting IPs, and DHCS reviewing them.
Each narrative response gets a summary, a confidence rating, and reasoning, the reviewer still decides.
The Decision
DHCS policy required every IP to be manually reviewed. An automated approval process risked losing context, missing required sign-offs, or approving something that should have been flagged, and that policy made sense. But it came at a cost: reviewers were reading long, subjective narrative responses with no consistent standard for what counted as a flag, and a single application could take 15 hours per reviewer to get through.
I pushed back on treating "manual" and "unassisted" as the same thing. Working with engineering, we designed an AI-assisted review tool that summarized each narrative response, rated it weak, moderate, or strong, and suggested a recommended action, without ever removing the reviewer from the decision.
The exemption request form before simplification, allocation tables, criteria checkboxes, and a justification field, all for one funding component.
What the Research Found
Partway through building the IP, we ran usability testing and interviews with county users. One finding stood out: the exemption request process, letting a county request an exception to a funding rule, was significantly harder to use than the rest of the IP. We'd been living inside the product long enough that its complexity had become invisible to us. County users told us they consistently needed outside help just to attach documentation, submit a request, and track DHCS's feedback on it.
We rebuilt the exemption flow to mirror the simpler, more familiar IP submission process instead of standing apart as its own complicated system.
A flagged narrative question with the DHCS reviewer's comment and the county's response, the actual human decision behind the AI's summary.
Designing Trust Into the AI Tool
The hardest part of this feature wasn't the AI, it was making sure reviewers trusted it enough to actually use it, without trusting it so much they stopped reading. Every summary shows its confidence rating next to the AI's suggested action, so a reviewer can see at a glance how much weight to put on it. The tool never auto-flags or auto-approves anything, it recommends, the reviewer decides and writes the final comment. That distinction was the entire design problem: build something fast enough to be worth using, without building something reviewers could rubber-stamp.
The DHCS dashboard reviewers use to track assigned counties, due dates, and submission status across draft and final IPs.
UX researchers, the go-to-market team, engineering, QA, product management, and DHCS executive leadership, across research, design system creation, feature roadmapping, and stakeholder presentations to state officials
Impact
Cut individual review time from 15 hours to 8, saving hundreds of hours per application across a 12 to 16 person review team
Reduced product development timelines from 15 sprints to 10 through rapid prototyping and design system reuse
Simplified the exemption request flow based on direct user research
Shipped 4 interconnected products supporting the full IP lifecycle, submission, review, comment, and approval