McKesson / Ontada / 2020–2022
Ontada: Unifying Revenue Cycle Workflows
Legacy tools made complex revenue-cycle workflows harder to navigate, analyze, and scale. The Total View 3 work focused on creating clearer visibility across denials, reimbursement, payer performance, and related financial operations while moving toward a more unified platform model.
Executive Summary
Ontada needed to move revenue lifecycle work out of fragmented legacy processes and into a clearer operational platform model. I led discovery, workflow modeling, MVP definition, and executive communication so SMEs, business leaders, and product teams could align around risk, visibility, and delivery priorities.
Operating Context
Billing accuracy, payer movement, remittance status, backend legacy constraints, financial risk, and competing stakeholder priorities converged in workflows that different teams understood differently. The work required turning operational dependencies into a shared product model while keeping immediate delivery and long-term platform direction in view.
Decisions That Shaped The Work
- Unify related workflows into one coherent modelAvoid treating each task as an isolated product experience.
- Design for multiple practice structuresThe model had to work across different roles, responsibilities, and team configurations.
- Preserve context throughout the workflowUsers should be able to move between analysis, detail, and action without losing the bigger picture.
- Evolve the platform without disrupting live workNew capabilities had to extend the existing product without blocking current operations.
Shaping the experience
Outcomes
What Changed
- Fragmented legacy system replacedThe resulting solution provided a more structured and scalable approach for managing the revenue cycle.
- Billing accuracy and visibility improvedImproved visibility across reimbursement, payer, billing, and related financial workflows.
- Created a reusable analytical frameworkShared interaction patterns supported multiple revenue-cycle workflows instead of treating each area as an isolated report.
- Supported different practice operating modelsThe product structure accounted for role and responsibility differences across small and large practices.
Principles I Carry Forward
What I Learned
- Complex systems make ambiguity expensive.When tasks, ownership, or risk are unclear, errors and poor decisions become more likely. The product should make responsibilities, consequences, and next steps explicit.
- Solve the immediate problem without closing off the future.MVP work should deliver something useful now while preserving the foundations needed for the system to expand and evolve.
- Constraints make boundaries more important, not less.Tight timelines and legacy systems increase pressure to compromise. Clear boundaries help teams make deliberate tradeoffs without undermining the underlying product model.