Increasing In-Home Evaluation (IHE)
conversion through discovery research
Signify Health set a 2025 goal to increase completed in-home evaluations (IHEs) by 25%. However, early drop-off and unclear value communication were limiting member participation. In this work, I led discovery research to understand what members value about IHEs, how they perceive healthcare services, and how to better communicate value across the service journey. Insights found informed strategic recommendations projected to improve conversion and service experience.
SCOPE
Discovery research, qualitative synthesis, sentiment analysis, user interviews, journey mapping
TOOLS
Dovetail, Figma, Excel, Otter.AI
TIMELINE
7 weeks
Background
Signify Health provides in-home health evaluations for eligible Medicare members. While these visits offer significant preventative care benefits, many eligible members do not complete scheduled appointments.
The product and service teams needed deeper understanding of:
What members value (or distrust) about IHEs
How current perceptions of healthcare shape engagement
Where breakdowns occur across the service journey
How communication could better support trust and motivation
Due to HIPAA constraints and limited access to internal member data, the project relied heavily on qualitative methods and secondary research. My work focused specifically on early-stage discovery: identifying behavioral drivers, experience mapping, and surfacing actionable opportunity areas.
The research was structured into four phases:
Framing the opportunity
Understanding the user
Exploring opportunities
Defining strategic direction
Goals
Understand member perceptions and trust barriers related to
in-home healthcare services
What beliefs influence willingness to schedule and complete IHEs?
Identify key experience factors impacting conversion
Where does confusion, hesitation, or disengagement occur?
Provide evidence-based recommendations to improve service experience
How might communication, structure, or touchpoints be improved?
Format
Phase 1
Secondary research (literature review, online feedback review, factor analysis)
Stakeholder interview
Phase 2
Semi-structured user interviews
Qualitative coding and thematic synthesis in Dovetail
Persona development
Phase 3
Experience mapping and journey mapping
Cross-team insight alignment and final presentation
Rationale
Because direct access to live member data was limited, qualitative discovery methods were prioritized to uncover attitudes, beliefs, and emotional drivers behind behavior. Secondary data and sentiment analysis provided additional validation and scale.
Audience
Interview participants: n = 8 (potential Signify Health members)
Online comments analyzed: 200+
Academic articles reviewed: 100+
Primarily older adults eligible for Medicare services
Participants with varied levels of healthcare trust and digital confidence
Insights
Framing the Opportunity Phase
Trust is the primary barrier to engagement
Members were hesitant to invite providers into their homes without clear reassurance, identity validation, and understanding of benefits. This suggested that trust-building must occur well before scheduling.
Lack of clarity creates anxiety and drop-off
The existing scheduling experience provided limited feedback about what would happen next, who would arrive, and how the visit would benefit them. This uncertainty contributed to hesitation and cancellation.
Accessibility gaps exclude high-need users
The cognitive walkthrough surfaced barriers for users with reduced vision, limited digital fluency, and cognitive load challenges — the very populations most likely to benefit from IHEs.
Design Synthesis
Personas
I synthesized research into two extreme persona archetypes to ensure the experience would accommodate edge cases rather than average users:
A newly eligible member with caregiver support, motivated by independence but highly skeptical of healthcare systems
An older adult living independently with limited digital confidence, motivated by support but concerned about legitimacy and communication clarity
These personas grounded all downstream mapping and recommendations.
Experience Mapping
I led the creation of a current-state experience map documenting how members navigate healthcare services without Signify support. This revealed where Signify was already adding value and where unmet needs still existed across emotional, behavioral, and informational dimensions.
Journey Mapping
Using personas, walkthrough findings, and qualitative insights, I created future-facing journey maps illustrating how redesigned touchpoints could reduce friction, increase trust, and improve conversion. These maps were used directly in stakeholder presentations to make opportunities tangible.
Design Validation and Outcomes
Rather than producing UI designs, this phase focused on strategic research deliverables that informed downstream work across teams.
Artifacts created by my team were used by other project groups in later design phases. Across the engagement, 14 opportunity areas (“big ideas”) were synthesized and delivered to Signify stakeholders.
If implemented, Signify projected these recommendations could increase completed IHEs by 25%+ by improving trust, clarity, and accessibility across the early journey.
Conclusions
This project demonstrated the value of upstream discovery research in shaping service strategy. By grounding recommendations in behavioral insight rather than assumptions, the work shifted focus away from surface-level optimizations toward deeper trust and experience issues.
It also reinforced how qualitative synthesis, when clearly communicated, can meaningfully influence stakeholder alignment and strategic direction in highly constrained environments (HIPAA, limited data access, complex populations).
Limitations
Limited access to internal member data due to privacy constraints
Small interview sample size for direct primary research
Focused primarily on early journey stages rather than full service lifecycle
