home : case study

Providence Healthcare / Accountability Matrix

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

Overview

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 a new internal tool called 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.

Impact at a glance:

• 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 and the institutional knowledge previously required to manage it
• 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 across the organization

My Approach

The discovery phase was already complete when I joined the project. My role was to take a detailed Business Requirements Document covering 40+ use cases, synthesize it into a coherent UX architecture, validate that thinking with stakeholders, and bring it across the finish line with an internal developer as a working, production-ready tool inside Providence's ecosystem.


Designing role specific workflows
The tool supports two primary user groups:




Designing in high fidelity
Once workflows were validated, I created high-fidelity Figma designs.

Partnering with engineering 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
• Maintain performance and security requirements
• Integrate the final UI into the internally hosted platform

We collaborated through weekly working sessions, async hand-offs, and iterative reviews until the tool matched the designs and behaved as intended.

---

Summary

The Accountability Matrix unified Providence's previously fragmented assignment processes into a single, robust platform. The tool that shipped:

• Standardizes department-to-caregiver accountability across the entire Providence system
• Enables Finance Partners to maintain accurate, up-to-date assignments independently
• Empowers Support Personnel 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

Lessons learned:

The biggest challenge on this project was not the design itself. It was making sense of a process so embedded in institutional knowledge and manual habit 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 actually sit down and use taught me 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.