Creating a solution for the homelessness and substance use disorder crisis in the state of California.
Project
DHCS County Portal and AI Review Insights
Client
California Department of Healthcare Services
My Role
Senior Product Designer and Researcher
Timeline
2 years
Overview
The Problem:
California has a population of 180,000+ people experiencing homelessness and substance use disorders. In 2024, the state of California passed prop 1, an initiative that aims to strengthen California’s behavioral health system by funding mental health treatment, substance use disorder services, and supportive housing for veterans and individuals facing homelessness.
The Solution:
Now that the funding was secured for these initiatives, the main task was figuring out how to create a system for counties in California to request funding and for DHCS to keep tabs on how that funding was being used. We were able to build an application that allows for users to collect county citizen data while adhering to strict HIPAA compliance, keep counties accountable for the funds they were requesting, balance state policy requirements with DHCS and county user feedback, and modernize current paper-only work flows.
My Contributions
What I did:
With the solution defined, I took on the responsibility of designing this statewide platform from the ground up. I drove the entire UX lifecycle, from conducting initial research with county users to designing the complex data flows and DHCS policy required to replace their paper-only systems and building out a robust design system across the DHCS organization. Balancing strict state policy with actual user feedback, I focused on clarity and a high standard of craft to ensure the final application wasn't just HIPAA compliant, but genuinely easy to use. Ultimately, I helped shape a system that allows counties to seamlessly request Prop 1 funding and coordinate vital services for over 150,000 vulnerable Californians. This included designing product pages, coordinating user research, defining product roadmaps, and stakeholder presentations.
Key deliverables:
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Transitioning California counties from a legacy paper based system to a digital platform meant users were highly sensitive to complex interfaces. I generated prototypes enhances by design system additions to rapidly test, deploy, and gather feedback HIPAA compliant data flows. The rapid product updates allowed for us to gather critical user feedback early and helped the team reduce time spent on design rework and engineering tech debt. Ultimately, this helped us reduce product research, design, and implementation timelines from 15 sprints to 10 sprints.
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DHCS reviewers were initially spending 15 hours each manually reviewing complex county funding applications which included massive amounts of financial data and narrative reasonings for county actions. I architected an AI driven review workflow to automate the initial review process, summarizing the narrative fields that were previously manually reviewed, and automated the budget calculation process. By streamlining the cognitive load being asked of the DHCS review teams, the AI Insights tool was able to cut down an individuals review time to 8 hours, multiply that amount of time across 16 reviewers for one application, and the end result is hundreds of hours saved through out the review of a single application.
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With Prop 1 funding secured, various stakeholders had competing priorities for what features should be built first, I collaborated directly with product management to define and implement a clear roadmap. This artifact was crucial for managing expectations, giving leadership confidence in the long term vision, creating clear actionable insights for developers, researchers, and go to market teams, and ensuing we sequenced feature releases based on actual user impact rather than assumptions.
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In far reaching government projects, stakeholder, development, research, and design misalignment can easily delay or even entirely block product launches, and for a product that had a set amount of funding for a number of years, this could be catastrophic in the long term. I created detailed presentations and workshop sessions to visually communicate exactly how the product would be used to coordinate services for over 150,000 Californians experiencing homelessness or substance use disorders. This lead to the successful product launch and implementation of 4 in depth interconnected products over the course of this project.
Who I worked with:
UX researchers
Iterative testing, feedback loops, and user interviews
Go to market team
Communications design, feature release scheduling, and stakeholder engagement
Engineering/development teams
Design hand-off, design system creation and implementation, and product releases
QA testing teams
Design testing, feature limit testing, and product updates
Product owner and product manager
Design and research road mapping, feature release scheduling, and county engagement
Executive leadership
Stakeholder presentations, DHCS policy requirements gathering, and product persona creation
