Innovation Payment Contractor Portal (IPC Portal)
The process of documenting payments and sending records to participants is surprisingly low-tech. A combination of mailed letters and emailed excel files leaves a lot of room for standardization and improvement.
• Create an online portal where participants and designated roles can view and submit changes to their payment information.
• Identify redundancies and bottlenecks where the process can be improved.
• Meet Federal Section 508 standards on all releases.
My primary role on this project is as a front-end developer. I was also primarily responsible for ensuring the project's successful passing of the Section 508 accessibility tests that would be paired with every major release. Also, as a member of the Human-Centered Design Team, I took part in workshops, design decisions, answering questions, and championing for users.
The IPC Project is currently in its fourth iteration (called IPC 4). I originally joined early in IPC 3. The current contract is worth over $18 million dollars and is planned to continue over multiple years.
The site is not available to the public and is only accessible to Medicare participants. There are multiple user roles, with different (although often related) user flows. They include: Model Owners, Designated Officials, Authorized Officials, with the possibility of new additional roles in the future.
Research was limited due to CMS/CMMI not wanting us to bother the user with in-depth testing. We were able to run a couple of workshops that included How-Might-We's and Crazy8s. We launched a short survey. We might also get user feedback from our built-in feedback form. We would also routinely hold demos of our work-in-progress and gauge feedback from our CMS partners.
Part of the difficulty was that this is a somewhat complicated process and users had often grown accustomed to making do with what they had.
Originally, I was brought on to the team as an intern and as a member of the Human-Centered Design Team. The core development team didn't have the time and sometimes the skills to realize the designer's Figma prototypes faithfully to the final version. I was originally brought on to do just that. Create the pages one by one and the development team could part out whatever parts were useful to their work. Ultimately, they were included in whole.
The initial pass at the IPC Portal project was just to get something workable online that would substitute the old process. This was already completed for the Designated Official role by the time I came on and I was involved for the Model Owner role from start to finish.
With the finish of this iteration, we had the opportunity to go back and update a lot of the tools and processes that had been used. We would be switching the vanilla HTML/CSS/Javascript to React, we would be rebuilding the older roles in the style of the newer ones, and we would be updating the previous iteration based on feedback and what we had learned from the previous build.
Beginning with some basic sketches:
I'm told that the initial build of the Innovation Payment Contractor Portal had to happen rather quickly. As a result, there were many accessibility problems to contend with. Non-semantic HTML, missing aria-label, alt-text, tab indexes not functioning properly, not refocusing screen reader focus as expected, sometimes focus was blocked completely.
This was less of a problem with the modernization, since we were building from scratch and had complete control. With the older version we were replacing we still needed to post occasional updates, we needed those to pass Section 508 testing, but we were planning on replacing that system so we didn't want to waste excess time rebuilding it.
This seemed most to fall under the umbrella of Human-Centered Design. And as the developer, it fell to me. So I fired up my test-copy of JAWs and the WAVE extension and started. There was some initial confusing back and forth with the testers, but once sorted, I was able to ensure we passed testing every time, saving the time and stress of rework to assure compliance.
There's something interesting about working on this project. So often the ideas are inherently interesting. Uber, Netflix, Tinder, etc are easily understandable. This wasn't the case. It's a perhaps boring piece of the Innovation Center which is probably an unknown service unless you're part of the Medicare/Medicaid space. But it's also necessary. Millions of dollars are tracked, reports generated, and updates accounted for. And to the people who depend on it, not just the providers who use the site, but the patients who at the end of the day get treatment or don't because of the money flow, it's much more important than a subjectively "cool" app.
Also, with the slow speed that the wheels of government turn, it's entirely possible that the site could outlive me. And that's some kind of immortality.