Closing the Gap Between Providers and 15M Healthgrades Users
Healthgrades endured years of leadership churn and strategic drift following an acquisition by Red Ventures in 2021 and being moved into a 2022 JV with UnitedHealth Group. By early 2025, the roadmap was fragmented—a patchwork of revenue-maintenance efforts without a unifying strategy.
My team needed to create a more cohesive experience to draw our B2B and B2C products together, enabling more potential patients to find the right provider.
Role | Sr. Director of Product Design
Initiative Duration | 1 year
Challenges
Declining demand for general health information post-COVID
Heavy reliance on SEO, challenged by Google algorithm shifts.
Generative AI reshaping top-of-funnel consumer behavior
Stricter privacy laws enabling first-party cookie opt-outs
Healthgrades supports 3 distinct business unit with little cross-investment
Little cohesion between B2B doctor and B2C patient user experiences
70% of B2C site engagement occurs on doctor profiles, yet the experience was outdated and fails to drive brand recognition
Reviews require a 2 week lead time to be published, driving down user sign-ups
Information overload across the site
Actions
Fortify Brand Value & User Trust
The team redesigned pivotal experiences to increase trust through improved usability and brand coherence.
Strengthen Relationships w/ Users
Reviews drive majority of B2C user acquisition. The team redesigned the review flow and used AI to reduce user friction and rework.
Forge a Dual-Sided Marketplace
We redesigned B2B doctor product to be end to end networking tool centered on referrals and secure communication.
Seed AI Experiences
Developed concepts for camera-based symptom checker and contextual content recommendation engine for Healthline.
Results
B2C User Engagement
25% lift in engagement on redesigned pages
10% improvement in user trust
74% increase in review completions
99% faster review processing (14 days → 1 hour)
24% increase in user account creation
Business Impact
Positioned Healthgrades for sustained growth and AI integration
Org Impact
Established unified design language and extensible design system
Fortify Brand Value and Usability
Despite attracting 15–20M annual unique visitors, Healthgrades lagged in brand recognition—consistently ranking below competitors like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and USNews. This, coupled with no additional marketing budget, meant that increasing user acquisition would rely solely on improving the user experience.
We focused on provider profile pages, which account for 70% of site traffic. These pages were static, dated, info-dense, and difficult to update.
We redesigned the experience around a modular, configurable front end, simplifying information hierarchy, deprioritizing low-value components, and applying an updated brand expression. This redesign also became the foundation of our new design system.
Impact: Sitewide engagement rose 25%, and user trust improved by 10%.
BEFORE - Healthgrades.com, circa 2024
AFTER - Healthgrades.com, circa 2025. Design by Greg Muth.
Strengthen Relationships with Users
User reviews are both the top driver of user trust and the strongest acquisition lever for Healthgrades. Yet the ux of leaving a review was broken: they took 2–3 weeks to post to the site due to a manual internal auditing process. Common rejections were often attributed to brand mentions, inappropriate language, and personal insults.
We overhauled the review flow—introducing guided inputs, inline suggestions, and an AI-powered co-pilot to help users submit compliant reviews while assisting internal moderators.
Impact: Review completions increased 74%, and processing time dropped from 14 days to 1 hour—a step change for both users and the business. Most importantly user account creation increased 24%.
Step 1: User writes their review and adds their emails address.
Should the review violate a Healthgrades review standard, our auditing AI will generate a realtime, inline response to suggest a solution.
Step 2: User selects review characteristics.
Step 3: User confirms review email.
These simple reductions have reduced review lead time by 99%, driving a 74% increase in review completions. Design by Gideon Fox.
Forge a Dual-Sided Marketplace
Healthgrades consists of three independently run businesses, all funneled through a single consumer-facing site:
Healthcare Systems (B2B) – sponsored experiences and provider profiles for hospitals
Life Sciences (B2B/B2C) – pharma-driven ad revenue
HGPro (B2B) – tools for individual providers to manage their online reputations
With little cross-investment, the user experience lacked cohesion. Our design opportunity was to create the feel of an integrated platform across Healthgrades.com and the provider-only HGPro, even if a single back-end platform wasn’t feasible.
We focused on expanding provider capabilities within HGPro. While product’s early thesis centered on messaging and career coaching, research showed stronger demand for referrals and enhanced reputation management tools. We advanced both streams, prototyping a new provider network experience.
Impact: The concept was received so positively that our JV partner, UHC, committed to support the platform launch across its 70,000 Optum providers.
HGPRO Provider Dashboard, 2025
HGPRO Provider Dashboard, 2025. Design by Brandi Myers
Seed AI Experiences
Contextual Recommendation AI suggests product recommendations based on article content and user data, then uses a GUI to drive prompt changes. Design by Christian Leong in 2023.
By late 2023, I turned focus to seeding AI experiences across the RVOH portfolio. Users engaged our brands for everything from broad health questions to finding a doctor, but these use cases were fragmented across disparate products. Our opportunity was to unify the portfolio through Healthline, our highest-traffic entry point.
I led a workshop to define potential use cases, personally wireframed concepts, and partnered with engineering to assess feasibility. We developed two viable approaches:
AI Takeover Experience – a guided, portfolio-wide entry point
Inline AI Widget – a lighter component syndicated across products
Both generated excitement, but overlapped with a parallel initiative already in development. Given resource constraints, we did not move forward with these pilots.
Impact: While not launched, this work laid critical groundwork for cross-portfolio AI applications and reinforced the need for dedicated ownership—helping influence the eventual creation of a central AI product team.
Step 1: Embedded AI CTA at the start of an article or listing.
Step 2: Engaging the CTA triggers an AI chat bottom sheet with sample prompts
Step 3: The AI assistant mines the RVOH portfolio for relevant content, provider, and product recommendations. Design by Christian Leong in 2023.
Artifacts
A small collection of artifacts I was directly responsible for: