Case Study — Healthcare / Accessibility
Breast Cancer Foundation
Reducing a Week-Long Financial Assistance Process to Hours
Reduced a week-long financial assistance process to hours — combining an administrative web application with a mobile app enabling patients to submit bills for immediate payment.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Company
TAP Developers
Platform
Web · Mobile
The Challenge
Cancer affects nearly every community, but for patients already living on a fixed or limited income, the financial burden can become almost as overwhelming as the treatment itself. The Breast Cancer Foundation of the Ozarks and Florida provides critical financial assistance to help patients stay current on essential expenses such as utilities, transportation, and other household bills while they navigate treatment. Yet the process for delivering that assistance was creating its own hardship. Staff relied on paper forms, email, and a massive, unstable spreadsheet to manage patient information, bills, approvals, and payments.
Processing could take days or longer—sometimes long enough for a patient's utilities to be disconnected before assistance arrived. The challenge was to replace an inefficient administrative process with a secure, accessible experience that made it easier for both staff and vulnerable patients to get the help they needed, when they needed it.
Process & Approach
User Research with Vulnerable Populations
Researched the needs of cancer patients and their caregivers with accessibility and simplicity as primary constraints.
Process Analysis
Mapped the existing paper-and-spreadsheet process end-to-end.
Mobile Bill Submission
Designed a mobile application enabling patients or caregivers to photograph and submit bills directly.
Administrative Web Application
Built an administrative web application replacing the unstable spreadsheet.
Application Screens
The Designed Experience
Outcomes & Impact
Hours
Assistance process time, down from approximately one week
2
Regions served from a single administrative system
0
Utility shutoffs while waiting for assistance after deployment
The resulting web and mobile solutions transformed a slow, paper-intensive process into a secure, streamlined assistance platform. Staff could manage participants, secure sensitive information, reconcile bills and payments in seconds rather than days, and generate the reporting and analysis essential to nonprofit operations. For patients and caregivers, the mobile experience reduced reimbursement to a remarkably simple interaction: select an eligible bill, take a photograph, and submit it—instantly transferring the documentation to the foundation.
The design put simplicity and accessibility at the center of the experience, recognizing that the people using it may be dealing with some of the most difficult circumstances of their lives. Future enhancements will take that simplicity even further by using image recognition to automatically identify the bill type, company, and amount. The ultimate measure of success wasn't simply replacing spreadsheets and paperwork—it was helping financial assistance reach patients faster, with less friction, when every day can matter.