Healthcare Governance Systems design Research

Providence Healthcare / Accountability Matrix

Providence Healthcare · 2024–2025 · Senior UX Designer

Design of a system-wide governance tool that brought order to one of Providence's most complex financial ecosystems, replacing fragmented manual processes with a single automated platform for reporting assignments across the entire organization.

Accountability Matrix

Providence Healthcare manages an enormous financial ecosystem spanning thousands of departments, multiple regions, and a broad community of finance and operations users. Before this project, there was no reliable way to determine which financial caregivers were responsible for which departments. The result was fragmented spreadsheets, manual distribution lists, access inconsistencies, and gaps in critical reporting.

The stakes were significant. Assignments made in this system fed downstream into multiple platforms including ValueLens, PowerBI, and Tableau, triggering automated delivery of financial reports and data to thousands of end users on daily and weekly schedules. When the assignment data was wrong or missing, the downstream effects rippled across the entire organization.

I was brought in to design the Accountability Matrix, using an existing Business Requirements Document as the foundational reference. The tool provides a single system of record for assigning, maintaining, and governing caregiver responsibilities across Finance and Operations roles throughout Providence.

  • Replaced a fragmented, manual assignment process with a single governed platform used across Providence's hospitals, departments, and regions
  • Automated downstream delivery of financial reports and data to thousands of end users, eliminating manual distribution
  • Empowered Finance Partners to self-manage assignments accurately without relying on spreadsheets or dev team involvement
  • Gave Super Users global editing, batch upload, change history, and rollback capabilities for the first time
  • Feeds real-time, precise data into ValueLens, PowerBI, Tableau, and other downstream reporting tools
1 Platform replacing dozens of fragmented spreadsheets
1,000s End users receiving automated reports downstream
4+ Downstream platforms fed with real-time data
0 devs Needed for Finance Partners to manage assignments
Accountability Matrix wireframes

Information Architecture & Wireframes

I created low-fidelity wireframes outlining key screens and workflows, including a department-to-caregiver grid view, user filters by region, state, hospital, department and role type, search by department ID or Employee ID, assignment edit modes, global swap and replace workflows, and Super User upload and rollback workflows. These wireframes were tested and iterated with Providence stakeholders to ensure alignment with internal processes.

Finance Partners

  • View departments they control
  • See all assigned caregivers within each Ops/Finance role
  • Add, remove, or replace individuals
  • Sort and filter departments
  • Perform full-responsibility swaps for departing or transitioning caregivers

Super Users

  • Add or remove Finance Partners from the tool
  • Migrate entire sets of responsibilities from one caregiver to another
  • Upload spreadsheets for large batch updates
  • View change history by department or user
  • Roll back erroneous changes

Designing in High Fidelity

Once workflows were validated, I moved into high-fidelity Figma designs. The screens below show the full range of the tool, from the core assignment grid through batch upload, change history, and role-specific views.

I worked closely with a dedicated developer and several database engineers to validate data structures against Providence's internal databases, ensure scalability across thousands of departments, and maintain performance and security requirements. Collaboration happened through weekly working sessions, async hand-offs, and iterative design reviews until the tool matched designs and behaved as intended.

  • Standardizes department-to-caregiver accountability across the entire Providence system
  • Enables Finance Partners to maintain accurate, up-to-date assignments independently
  • Empowers Super Users with global editing, history controls, and rollback capabilities
  • Feeds downstream reporting tools with precise, real-time data
  • Reduces errors, eliminates redundant spreadsheets, and safeguards sensitive financial information

The Accountability Matrix unified Providence's previously fragmented assignment processes into a single, robust platform. It removed the institutional knowledge tax that had made the old process fragile, and gave every stakeholder, from Finance Partners to Super Users to downstream report consumers, a system they could actually rely on.

Lessons Learned

  • The biggest challenge was not the design itself. It was making sense of a process so embedded in institutional knowledge that most stakeholders had never seen it visualized before.
  • Taking a 40+ use case Business Requirements Document and turning it into something a real person could sit down and use reinforced that clarity is the hardest design problem.
  • Anyone can make something look clean. The real skill is understanding a complex, ambiguous system deeply enough to make it feel simple to the people who depend on it every day.

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