BuildOnMe · Medical malpractice insurance
Redesigning NORCAL’s insurance claims process
- Role
- User Experience Director
- Duration
- 2020 to 2022
- Skills
- 0→1 design execution
- Discovery research
- Requirements definition
- Design strategy
- Workshop facilitation
Impact
NORCAL never shipped our design.
It became our product.
ProAssurance, which acquired NORCAL after we delivered the app, was not a ServiceNow® shop and shelved it immediately.
But, the custom React experience layer I designed, which frees ServiceNow® from its own rigid UI, had promise.
It became BuildOn Bedrock, BuildOnMe's first certified ServiceNow® application.
Certified App
BuildOn Bedrock · buildon.me
The problem
Claims specialists worked each claim across three systems, and every jump put NORCAL at risk.
At the center of the workflow was an out-of-the-box ServiceNow® application, and each jump invited errors in the record, misstated reserves, missed coverage defenses, and blown SLAs.
For example, every coverage came back “Invalid” with no reason given, causing more work for the specialist.
With no clear on-screen guidance, new specialists found CIA confusing and difficult to learn, adding operational friction.
“[I’m] still learning my way in CIA.”
The process
As Director of UX, I led the redesign, owning discovery through delivery.
My process resembled a typical consulting engagement.
- I interviewed stakeholders.
- I ran requirements sessions with stakeholders, our Chief Product Officer, and key functional staff.
- I validated the findings with support staff and claims specialists.
- I created the design plan and estimates.
- I designed wireframes and revised them with the day-to-day working team:
- Vice President of Information Technology
- Director UX Strategy & Customer Experience
- Claims Director
- Analyst/Scrum Master
- We built the app in sprints with our offshore development team, whom I led and directed.
- We delivered the app to NORCAL.
- We productized and revised the app through ServiceNow® certification.
Key Insight: CIA already had the data. It didn’t have the connections, and it didn’t have the screens.
The solution
I designed a single, guided pane of glass to keep specialists in one system and surface the right data at the right moment: CIA 2.0.
The problem was making a rigid platform deliver what the work demanded. To solve it, our devs enabled a custom React canvas inside ServiceNow®, and I designed on it.
I needed to properly frame our approach to intelligence from the start.
NORCAL's director of UX strategy wanted a conversational bot that audited every claim continuously. AI wasn't in the MVP, and Claims was resistant to change. Caught between scope constraints and the need to satisfy a key stakeholder, I used a CRAWL-WALK-RUN framework and collaborated with the working group to identify candidate features to showcase advanced functionality.
We identified three candidates: claims audit, risk meter, and defense counsel assignment.
An auditor checked each file after the fact, searching activity notes to fill in a spreadsheet.
- crawl:
- The system answers the factual yes-or-no items and flags the rest for a person to review.
- walk:
- A confidence score on each subjective item.
- run:
- Auditing runs continuously while the claim is open.
My overview had a meter for claim risk, and nobody could say how to score it. Our CPO first suggested a manual rating. NORCAL’s analyst pointed out that specialists already enter liability, defensibility, and exposure on the reserve worksheet, so the system could calculate the score.
- crawl:
- The system calculates risk from what specialists already enter on the reserve worksheet: severity, liability, defensibility, and exposure.
- walk:
- The system checks its scores against how claims actually closed, projected versus actual cost, and tunes the calculation.
- run:
- The system predicts risk at first notice, before any worksheet, from the history of claims with the same specialty, injury, and venue.
Directors assigned firms from a panel, and nobody tracked how a firm performed on claims like the one at hand.
- crawl:
- The system matches firms to the claim by venue, specialty, dollar amount, and risk level, and ranks them by how many claims like it they’ve handled and their open capacity.
- walk:
- The system ranks firms by results on comparable claims: how close the actual cost came to the projection, since a settlement under projection can still be a win.
- run:
- The system adds NORCAL’s outside billing and outcome data and pairs it with the risk predicted at first notice, so counsel is recommended on day one.
The three connect. The risk score from the reserve worksheet feeds the counsel ranking, so a high-risk, high-dollar claim goes to the firm with the best record on claims like it.
Three core features carried the work.
I designed every part of CIA 2.0, from communications to tasks and notes. FNOL drove call center productivity, and Coverage and Transactions carried the most legal and financial risk. Each is a crawl. The system does the checking, and people make the calls.
01 FNOL (First Notice of Loss)
From intake chaos to a guided experience.
Experienced reps built workarounds but still mis-characterized claims, and first-timers had no reference at all.
CIA's forms had no field-level guidance, no claim type logic, and no sense of how early decisions affected downstream work. One broken form system produced two distinct failures.
I designed two paths: a legacy traditional path for experienced reps and a guided, conversational wizard for beginners.
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Notes on the screen: 1. Teaching the why. 2. Guided instructions. 3. Crawl: system suggests, user confirms.
02 Coverage Wizard
From swivel-chair to guided determination.
To decide coverage, specialists left CIA twice: once for policy data in Oasis, and once for the policy itself in ImageRight.
Coverage analysis didn't exist in CIA. It showed only whether a policy was in effect, and the reasons coverage failed lived in Oasis, which drove a significant number of help desk tickets. NORCAL's Coverage Review Checklist was used inconsistently, so specialists made unrecorded decisions that exposed NORCAL legally.
I turned the checklist into a 12-question wizard inside the claim, with the policy details and supporting documents pulled in beside each question.
03 Transactions
From reactive alerts to proactive risk management.
Saving the reserve worksheet overwrote the reserve on the spot, and nothing warned specialists as expenses neared the limit.
A reserve is the money NORCAL sets aside to pay a claim, from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, and it's the highest-stakes number in NORCAL's business. NORCAL expects the final reserve on file within 9 months of a report becoming a claim or suit. CIA tracked none of it, so problems surfaced only after they had become crises.
I designed an alert at 90% of the reserve limit, a worksheet specialists can save as a draft, and an audit trail on every override.
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Notes on the screen: 1. Avert crises!!. 2. Audit trail. 3. Drives risk meter.
The outcome
From a client redesign to BuildOnMe's first ServiceNow® certified product.
We designed the CIA 2.0 comps to double as sales collateral for any ServiceNow® client. When ProAssurance shelved CIA 2.0, our team revised the technical foundation and certified the pattern I designed as BuildOn Bedrock. I'm proud of that, and of the team I built it with.