Authored · 2026 · 1 of 6
Specialty Intake Service Blueprint
Mapping the digital front door for 48 specialty practices.
At a glance
Took on a new AI squad serving 48 specialty healthcare practices. In ten days I built the research, synthesis, and service blueprint the squad uses as its shared model. The blueprint is EHR-portable across athenaOne, eCW, NextGen, and specialty-native systems, and it's the reason we know what to ship first.
Context
Artera is a B2B2C patient communication platform serving health systems and practices. In May 2026 I moved from Director of Product Design into a Head of AI role leading a new squad chartered by the CEO to serve 48 specialty practices across orthopedics, pain, GI, cardio, ophthalmology, behavioral health, OB/GYN, urology, radiology, and oncology.
Specialty intake is the digital front door: registration, eligibility, prior auth prep, pre-visit clinical data, records retrieval, consents, and financial collection. It is also the part of the platform we understood the least.
The problem
We had a 9-builder squad, a CEO-level mandate, an agent-first charter, and no shared model of the work we were trying to change. Nobody on the squad could answer the question that came up every week: should this be an agent, a UI, or a workflow automation? Without a common map of the intake journey, every capability bet would be argued from anecdote.
Research and ramp
In my first ten days I wrote a ramp plan and worked it. I authored four research briefs on the segment, each with an exec summary and a deeper version, covering the specialty landscape, the EHR terrain, the intake workflow itself, and the cohort.
I wrote a synthesis memo pulling the briefs into a point of view on where the squad should play. I did an account-by-account pass on the 48-practice cohort to pressure-test segment assumptions against real deployments. I drafted a squad primer and scoped the seven decisions I owned in week one.
The goal of the ramp was not to look prepared. It was to earn the right to draw the map.
The artifact
The Specialty Intake Service Blueprint is a single Figma document that holds current-state and future-state in the same frame. Six swim lanes run across more than ten journey phases: patient emotion, frontstage human, frontstage digital, backstage, support systems, and pain points. The future-state layer shows where agents, UI, and workflow automation each belong in the journey.
It is written to be EHR-portable across athenaOne, eCW, NextGen, and specialty-native systems, because the cohort is not homogenous and a blueprint tied to one EHR would not survive contact with the accounts we actually serve. The 3168x4380 master frame carries a legend and annotated cards, and a source-of-truth markdown version lives next to the file so the blueprint stays legible outside Figma.
What it unlocked
The blueprint became the squad's shared model within the first month. When we debated whether a piece of work should be an agent or a UI, we pointed at the same picture.
It made our first capability bet defensible: Phase 3 and Phase 4, pre-registration and eligibility, which the blueprint showed as the densest concentration of backstage effort and patient friction across the cohort.
It gave implementation and engineering a common frame for scoping, gave product a place to stage future bets against, and gave me something to hand the CEO that explained what the squad was building toward without a deck. The squad is weeks old and nothing has shipped yet. The blueprint is the reason we know what to ship first.