The money journey: billing and payments for members and the teams who help them

Paying for care is where trust is won or lost. Medical bills are confusing, and confusion turns into support calls and unpaid balances.

Members needed to understand what they owe and why. Operations teams needed one place to see a visit’s billing story without digging through systems. Both had to work inside real constraints, like two practices that bill as two separate legal entities.

I designed the money journey end to end as one system, from the first estimate to the final receipt, plus the internal tools behind it.

• One walkable prototype covering 16+ post-visit states and pre-visit cost confirmation.
• Member payment flows, FSA and HSA support, payment plans, receipts and invoices.
• Care App internal billing for the MCA and RCM operations teams.
• Dot concepts that answer billing questions in plain language, and copy rules for every money screen.

• Be honest about two payments. When bills span two practices, the money has to land in two accounts, so it takes two checkouts. Instead of showing one $800 total and revealing the split later, members see the split up front, practice by practice.
• Speak the member’s language. Statuses follow one vocabulary from the PRD: Estimate available, With insurance, Finalizing your balance, Ready to pay, Closed. Draft balances can’t be paid.
• Make receipts reconcile. Invoices read as a timeline (visit cost, insurance paid, contractual write-off, your payments) ending in a balance, so they match the EOB.

• Reviewed in rounds with product, engineering and the MCA team, with every round folded straight into the prototype.
• Surfaced PRD gaps before build, like keeping dependents’ balances separate and fees needing their own invoice.
• Packaged as a shared repo built on my demo kit, so engineers and designers always open the latest version.

A confusing bill became a sequence members can follow.