Case Study · Digital Health Behavior Change · Enterprise Healthcare
Behavior change inside a national healthcare system.
A portfolio of digital health and behavior-change pilots within CVS Health's pharmacy, care-management, and HealthHUB ecosystem — translating patient insight into interventions designed for trust, adoption, and real-world use.
- Role
- Strategist + Designer
- Organization
- CVS Health
- Period
- 2019 — 2021
- Scope
- Digital health pilots · Pharmacy and care-management contexts · Chronic-condition support · Older adults, Medicare, Medicaid, and underserved populations
- Research Focus
- How do you design behavior-change interventions that can survive inside a complex healthcare system?
Thesis
The work was not only the prototype. It was getting the prototype through the system.
Healthcare behavior change does not fail only at the patient level. It fails in handoffs, incentives, workflows, compliance reviews, operating constraints, and trust gaps.
A good idea is not enough.
- —It has to be legible to legal.
- —Useful to care teams.
- —Operationally realistic.
- —Acceptable to patients.
- —Aligned with the business.
That was the work.
The Problem
Medication adherence is not just a reminder problem.
It is a trust problem. It is a routine problem. It is a comprehension problem. It is a life-context problem.
Medication non-adherence remains one of the largest cost and care-quality challenges in U.S. healthcare. But the people most affected by chronic-condition burden are often least served by conventional digital health tools: older adults, Medicare and Medicaid members, people managing multiple conditions, and patients navigating fragmented care.
CVS Health had national reach. It had pharmacy touchpoints, care-management infrastructure, and relationships with patients across everyday health moments.
The opportunity was to build a behavior-change layer on top of that infrastructure — one grounded in human behavior, not just engagement mechanics.
The question was not whether to intervene. It was how to intervene without adding burden.
Approach
Three disciplines had to work together.
Research. Behavioral science. Enterprise translation. None of them could sit alone.
- 01
Research Grounded in Context
The work began with patient and pharmacy realities. Not ideal workflows. Real ones.
We studied how people encountered care, medication, reminders, instructions, confusion, stigma, and competing demands inside everyday life.
The goal was to find the moments where a cue could actually help.
- 02
Behavioral Science Made Usable
Behavioral economics frameworks informed messaging, adherence nudges, health literacy concepts, and interaction design.
The work was not to make behavior feel manipulated. It was to reduce friction at the moment a person was already trying to do the right thing.
- 03
Cross-Functional Translation
The work moved across design, product, marketing, legal, clinical, and operations.
That translation was not overhead. It was the adoption mechanism.
Most pilots do not fail because no one liked the idea. They fail because no one designed the path from idea to use.
Method
How the work moved from insight to pilot.
- 01
Field Research
Conducted and synthesized qualitative research across pharmacy and care contexts, including patient interviews, stakeholder conversations, and in-store observation.
The focus was chronic-condition management, medication adherence, health literacy, and moments of friction in the care journey.
- 02
Journey Mapping
Mapped patient journeys across conditions such as asthma, cardiac care, depression, and chronic medication use.
The maps were not decorative. They showed where trust was lost, where motivation dropped, and where support arrived too late.
- 03
Design Sprints
Translated insight into testable concepts through rapid design sprints.
Each concept had to be evaluated through multiple constraints at once: patient burden, clinical appropriateness, and operational feasibility.
- 04
Prototype + Pilot
Developed wireframes, messaging concepts, interactive prototypes, and early experience flows.
One exploration used web-based augmented reality to support asthma education and medication understanding without requiring an app install.
The work asked a simple question: what if comprehension is felt before it is understood?
- 05
Handoff + Adoption
Prepared concepts, documentation, and implementation logic for movement into CVS Health's broader pharmacy, care-management, and HealthHUB environments.
The goal was not only a good pilot. The goal was a concept that could keep its integrity after handoff.
Featured Exploration
Augmented reality for health literacy.
Some health information is hard to understand because it is abstract. Dose. Technique. Timing. Sequence. Risk.
For asthma and medication adherence, I explored web-based AR as a way to make health education more spatial, embodied, and immediate — especially for people who may not benefit from dense text, static diagrams, or app-heavy flows.
- Platform
- 8th Wall web-based AR
- Use Cases
- Asthma inhaler technique · Medication adherence education · Health literacy support
- Context
- Social determinants of health · HealthHUB innovation · Chronic-condition support
The insight was simple: comprehension is not only cognitive. It is perceptual.
Outcomes
What the work supported.
The pilots helped translate behavioral insight into enterprise-ready healthcare experiences.
- 12
- Digital behavior-change pilots supported or advanced
- 20+
- Pharmacy and care contexts involved across pilot work
- National
- Designed within a CVS Health environment serving tens of millions of patients and members
- Adherence
- Supported initiatives aimed at improving chronic medication adherence and care engagement
- Cross-functional
- Selected concepts and workflows advanced into care-team, pharmacy, and HealthHUB contexts
What Made the Work Hard
The design was only part of the job. The harder part was translation.
A patient insight had to become a prototype.
The prototype had to become a business case.
The business case had to survive legal, clinical, marketing, product, and operations review.
Then it had to be simple enough for a real person to use while managing a real life.
That is where healthcare innovation often breaks. Not in the idea. In the passage from idea to system.
What This Changed
This work sharpened my understanding of scale.
Scale is not reach alone.
Scale is adoption under constraint.
It is what happens when a concept enters a system with existing workflows, risk tolerances, regulatory boundaries, staffing realities, and business incentives.
The work reinforced a pattern I have seen across healthcare:
People do not reject innovation because they dislike change. They reject it when it does not respect their reality.
Lineage
This case sits between research and implementation.
It built on earlier work in caregiver physiology, sensory intervention, and behavioral health. It also shaped the adaptive systems work that followed.
- —If a cue is going to support return, it has to arrive in the right context.
- —If a system is going to intervene, it has to understand trust.
- —If a product is going to be adopted, it has to reduce burden instead of moving it somewhere else.
Those lessons now inform my work across healthcare strategy, AI-enabled care experiences, service design, and SOMA Systems.
Reflection
Healthcare systems do not need more clever concepts. They need concepts that can survive contact with reality.
The most important thing I learned at CVS was that a behavior-change intervention has to pass through many rooms before it reaches a patient. Each room can flatten it. Delay it. Dilute it. Kill it.
The work is to protect the human signal through that process.
- What does the patient need?
- What will the care team actually use?
- What can the system sustain?
When those three align, adoption becomes possible.
Collaborate
Strategy that survives the operating system.
Open to senior strategy, design research, and healthcare innovation work at the intersection of behavior change, care delivery, AI-enabled experiences, and enterprise implementation.