BuildOnMe · Medical malpractice insurance
From Reactive to Intelligent
The NORCAL Group's claims specialists worked high-stakes malpractice claims with no guidance, no intelligence, and no record of their decisions on an out-of-the-box ServiceNow solution. BuildOnMe engaged with NORCAL to design and build the fix.
As Director of UX for BuildOnMe, I redesigned the new experience, CIA 2.0, pushing ServiceNow past its limits with a custom React layer and some innovative thinking.
- Role
- User Experience Director
- Duration
- 2020–2022
- Team
- BuildOnMe: CEO, CPO,
ServiceNow Tech Lead, Devs (Offshore, 3)
NORCAL: VP IT, Business Analyst,
extended claims team (12) - Responsibilities
- 0→1 design executionDiscovery researchRequirements definitionDesign strategyWorkshop facilitation
The outcome
NORCAL never shipped CIA 2.0.
It became our product.
ProAssurance, who was not a ServiceNow shop, acquired NORCAL after we delivered the app…and shelved it immediately. But the thing I designed, a custom React experience layer that breaks ServiceNow out of its own UI, had legs. It became BuildOn Bedrock, BuildOnMe's certified ServiceNow application.
Designed
CIA 2.0, a React layer on ServiceNow
Shelved at NORCAL
ProAssurance acquisition, not a ServiceNow shop
Shipped as a product
BuildOn Bedrock, certified and live
servicenow
Certified App
BuildOn Bedrock · buildon.me
The problem
NORCAL's specialists ran every medical-malpractice claim through CIA, the Claims Intelligence Application. It recorded what happened but never guided the work, turning the firm's most consequential decisions into its most exposed.
The project ran against a moving backdrop, and I was designing intelligence into a platform whose owner was changing hands.
NORCAL, a San Francisco medical-malpractice carrier, was being acquired by ProAssurance, based in Georgia and a much larger national writer, in a $450M deal completed in 2021.
The solution
I extended ServiceNow past its native limits into a single, guided pane of glass, Claims 2.0.
I owned the CIA redesign from discovery through ServiceNow scoped-application certification. The problem was making a rigid platform deliver what the work demanded: keep specialists in one system, surface the right data at the right moment, and make compliance documentation a byproduct of the work itself.
The core
Three features carried the work.
I designed every facet of the experience including communications, tasks, notes, but three of them carried the core as well as the most legal and financial risk.
Transactions
From reactive alerts to proactive risk management.
A reserve is the money NORCAL sets aside to pay a claim, its promise made concrete. This feature was designed to govern that number, the highest-stakes number in NORCAL's business, with a 90%-of-ceiling alert, an enforced worksheet, and an automatic audit trail on every decision.
The detail↓
The problem.Specialists manage reserves, the projected cost of a claim from investigation through resolution, ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars and required to be finalized within 9 months of a claim advancing, a hard regulatory deadline. CIA tracked none of it, and gave no warning as expense actuals approached the ceiling. Problems surfaced only after they had become crises.
The solution.When actuals reach 90% of the ceiling, a contextual alert now fires directly in the claim record, prompting action while there's still room to respond. The New Worksheet enforces the full decision chain: low and high estimates, liability assessment, apportionment, raw claim estimate, policy limit, suggested reserve, and any override with documented rationale. Nothing can be skipped, and every decision posts to an automatic audit trail.
“Set a reserve wrong and you have not made a workflow error. You have put NORCAL's ability to pay the claim, and stay solvent, at risk.”
Coverage Wizard
From swivel-chair to guided determination.
A 12-question wizard that ended Oasis pogosticking and captured every coverage decision, verification through legal determination, in one place.
The detail↓
The problem.CIA ran the claim lifecycle. Oasis held policy data needed to decide coverage. Since there was no integration, specialists bounced between them to verify basic facts.
They had to work a complex legal determination with no guidance, no structured record, and no enforcement. NORCAL's own Coverage Review Checklist was used inconsistently and decisions went both undocumented and legally exposed.
The solution.Eliminate the Oasis round-trip by surfacing policy type, endorsements, limits of liability, and plain-language coverage-flag explanations inside the claim record.
I then designed the Coverage Review Checklist as a 12-question wizard with supporting documents pulled in-line. Every answer could be captured, compiled, and ready for director review and C&L submission without leaving the platform.
“The goal was to hide the complexity, not ignore it.”
Guided First Notice of Loss
From intake chaos to a guided experience.
A guided wizard designed to reduce call center attrition and better train service reps, increase data-entry accuracy, and enforce correct characterization before a claim ever reaches a specialist.
The detail↓
The problem.Everything in the claims lifecycle depends on the integrity of the First Notice of Loss, the intake a customer service rep creates to open a claim. CIA's forms had no field-level guidance, no claim type logic, and no sense of how early decisions affected downstream work.
Experienced reps built workarounds but still mis-characterized; first-timers had no reference at all. One broken form system, two distinct failures.
The solution.To accommodate both long-tenured expert users as well as new novice users, I offered a choice at entry: a direct traditional path for those who knew it and a guided, auto-populated wizard with detailed explanations for everyone else.
The honest part
The version I built for NORCAL never went live. The idea it proved did.
Carrying CIA 2.0 from discovery through a working build proved a rigid platform could hold genuine workflow intelligence and break out of ServiceNow's rigid interface. Even if ProAssurance, who acquired NORCAL, didn't implement it.
And that idea became our company's first product.
BuildOn Bedrock is a company's work, and to bring it to life, our team had to revise some of the technical foundation. But the lineage is direct. The pattern I designed for CIA 2.0 is the pattern BuildOn Bedrock generalized and certified. I drove the design helping to prove it could be built, and I'm really proud of that and the team I worked with.