Amanda Schmutzler
Get Care
Helping members find every way to access care, inside a highly regulated clinical environment.
- Problem: members had no single place to see every way to access care — video, urgent, scheduled, self-service.
- Users: members choosing how to access care, and the clinical stakeholders who had to sign off on every path before it could ship.
- Approach: one unified "Find Care" entry point, grounded in empathy maps and real member personas.
- Process: a full human-factors cycle, including a week-long in-person design sprint with clinical stakeholders.
- Impact: validated, ADA-compliant designs delivered for a system serving 12.5M+ members.
How Get Care came together
One entry point
Video, urgent care, scheduled, and e‑visits in one screen.
Started with research
Empathy maps, personas, and a week-long in-person sprint.
Tested early, then again
Tested 5 desktop and 5 mobile concepts, then the final designs.
Accessibility built in
ADA requirements designed in from the first sketch.
Introduction
Get Care helps members find every way to access care at Kaiser Permanente — from scheduling to urgent options — inside a highly regulated clinical environment where documentation had to meet ADA accessibility standards at every step.
My Role
I owned this as part of the ACAA (Access Care Anytime, Anywhere) team: mapping where members were getting stuck across four disconnected access paths, setting the direction for a single unified "Find Care" entry point, and aligning clinical, compliance, and engineering stakeholders behind it through a week-long in-person design sprint. What shipped was a validated, ADA-compliant design for a system serving 12.5M+ members.
The problem, and the approach
What kept members from finding care easily, and how the redesign addressed each one.
Problems
- Members didn't have one clear place to see every way to access care
- Entry points for video visits, urgent care, and scheduling were fragmented
- Documentation had to meet ADA accessibility standards at every step
- Clinical stakeholders required rigorous review before anything shipped
Solutions
- Unified entry point: a single "Find Care" screen surfacing every access path — video visit, urgent care, scheduled visit, and e-visit.
- Empathy-mapped personas: grounded every decision in real member needs and behaviors, not assumptions.
- ADA-compliant documentation: built into the design system from day one, not bolted on after.
- Concept-validated prototypes: tested before final designs moved to engineering.
Research approach
The project ran through a full human-factors research cycle: empathy maps, persona boards, "how might we" ideation, and scenario mapping, validated with concept-exploration prototypes before final designs went to engineering.
Mapped member needs, frustrations, and context across urgent, scheduled, and self-service care scenarios.
Built persona boards and "how might we" prompts to reframe fragmented access as one connected flow.
Tested concept-exploration prototypes with real usability sessions before locking final designs.
Research & the care landscape
How member needs shaped the findings below, and the care options they were weighing against one another.
Research findings
Synthesized insights from empathy mapping and persona work, distilled into the findings that shaped the design direction.
- Convenience and speed: Members wanted the fastest path to appropriate care, and separating virtual options from traditional routes made the quickest paths easy to spot.
- Nature of care: Before choosing, members needed to know whether they were getting advice and communication or actual treatment.
- Foreseeing outcomes: Especially for more urgent symptoms, members wanted insight into what would follow — referrals, prescriptions, or a quick path to tests.
- Gauging appropriateness: Members compared options by connecting their symptoms to the right setting (a video visit for a skin issue vs. in-person for something internal) and by confirming what a provider could actually do — consult, diagnose, or treat.
- Cost awareness: Members wanted a general sense of cost to weigh against other options, with a clear path to plan benefits for specifics.
- Guidance tools: Symptom guidance was most valuable for less-familiar care needs, not common symptoms — and needed to be presented so it never implied self-diagnosis or got in the way of simply choosing a care option.
Available care options
These are the care options available for members today — spanning phone, video, in-person, and self-service paths to care.
Design sprint
Design sprint follow-up →
A week-long design sprint brought designers, researchers, and clinical stakeholders together in person to work through the problem as a group.
Sketches & concept exploration
Individual sketches from that same sprint, worked out on paper before anything moved into Figma — the "How Might We" wall from the workshop, and hand-drawn concept and scenario sketches walking through how a member like Julia would actually move through the flow.
Deliverables
Interactive prototypes covering both the concept-exploration phase and the final, validated experience — plus the redlined specs that carried it into development.
A few decisions worth explaining
None of these were arbitrary — each traded simplicity for something that mattered more in a regulated, clinical environment.
Why one entry point, not four
Video visits, urgent care, scheduled visits, and e-visits could have stayed four separate features, each optimized on its own. I merged them into a single Find Care screen instead — the member's actual question is rarely "which of these four products do I want," it's "how do I get care right now."
Collapsing the paths meant giving up some path-specific real estate on the entry screen. But it meant a member in a hurry never had to first figure out which of four doors to knock on.
Why concept prototypes got tested too
It would have been faster to validate only the final, polished designs. I pushed to run usability sessions on the rougher concept-exploration prototype as well, before the direction was locked — clinical and accessibility problems are far cheaper to catch in a wireframe than after engineering has already built against a spec.
Testing twice cost more sprint time. It also meant nothing expensive got built on top of an untested assumption.
Why the sprint was in person, for a week
A distributed, async research process would have been easier to schedule. I pushed for a week-long, in-person design sprint instead — the people who had to sign off on this (clinical stakeholders, researchers, engineering) needed to work through the empathy maps and "how might we" prompts together.
Being in the room together got us to actual shared conviction, rather than each person reviewing a deck on their own time and rubber-stamping it.
Why bluelines, not just a Figma link
A shared Figma file with comments would have been the lighter-weight handoff. I produced fully redlined bluelines instead — exact spacing, styling, and copy for every screen.
A regulated clinical build doesn't have room for engineering to interpret intent. ADA compliance and clinical accuracy both depend on the spec being unambiguous the first time, not caught in a later review cycle.
Outcomes
Get Care shipped into a live, highly regulated environment. Exact metrics are confidential, but the directional shifts were clear.
One path, not fourCollapsing scheduling, urgent care, self-service, and phone support into a single entry point measurably cut how often members landed on the wrong path before finding the right one.
Clean compliance reviewBecause ADA and clinical requirements were designed in from the first sketch — not audited in afterward — the final build cleared compliance review without a redesign cycle.
No costly reworkTesting concept-exploration prototypes before locking final designs caught issues early, so nothing expensive got built on an untested assumption and later had to be redone.
What I learned
Test the rough version, not just the polished one. I learned that clinical and accessibility problems are far cheaper to catch in a wireframe than after engineering has built against a spec, which is why I pushed to test the concept prototypes too.
Get the decision-makers in the room. I learned that a week in person got clinical stakeholders, researchers, and engineering to shared conviction in a way a deck review and a quiet sign-off never would.
The higher the stakes, the less room for interpretation. I learned that in a regulated clinical build, a spec has to be unambiguous the first time. Fully redlined bluelines took longer than a Figma link, but they took the guesswork out.
Why I gravitate toward this kind of work
Regulated, high-stakes systems come with real constraints. I've come to prefer designing inside them, not around them.
01 · Regulated systems, real constraintsADA compliance, clinical review, and legal sign-off weren't obstacles to design around — they shaped the design itself, and I built for them from the first sketch.
02 · Accessibility isn't a checklistI validated designs with real usability sessions, not just an audit at the end, because accessibility only works when it's tested with the people who need it.
03 · Research-informed, not research-decoratedThe empathy maps and "how might we" sessions weren't a formality. They're where Get Care's direction came from, and every decision traces back to them.
Why bring me onto your team
If your roadmap includes a system where the stakes are real — clinical, financial, or otherwise regulated — I'm the designer who wants to be in the room for the hard parts: the compliance review, the edge case, the stakeholder who says no. I've shipped inside those constraints before, and I'd like to do it for your team next.
"I know I can reliably count on her for solving complex UX problems, designing and documenting design system components, and prototyping large-scale flows at blistering speeds."
