Every prior authorization started with a fax.

Across five markets — Texas, Georgia, Utah, California, Virginia — fax was the only way in. No validation, no real-time data, no status once a request left the desk. Processing stretched up to a month, and internal teams spent hours turning unstructured faxes into actionable records.

So we asked the people sending them.

Provider interviews on how authorizations actually got done, then usability testing on the digital submission flow to find where it still caught. Both synthesized into empathy maps.

A fax is one flat page. A portal needs a structure.

So I drew the shape of it: what belongs on the dashboard, what belongs inside a request, and what a provider needs to see after they hit submit. Authorization rules came out of clinical ops’ heads and became the form’s own logic.

Status got a place of its own — the one thing a fax could never give back. And the patterns that came out of it were reusable, so the next Bright surface started from a structure instead of a blank page.

They weren't asking for software. They were asking for an answer.

What providers wanted was narrow and specific, and almost none of it was about a better form.

The hard part wasn't the form. It was the rules behind it.

I mapped authorization rules into form logic with clinical operations, so the portal could tell a provider what was required before they submitted rather than after. Continuous prototype testing tightened every step of the flow, and an empty-state dashboard grew with the user.

One system. Five markets. White-label from the start.

I partnered with the broader team on a scalable design system with white-labeling support, shipping patterns the team could reuse across other Bright surfaces.