ODS Health Plans

ODS has been a pioneer in affordable health plans in the Pacific Northwest for more than 50 years. Like similar enterprise organizations, ODS has many legacy websites and applications that need to be adapted and re-imagined for mobile audiences. The venerable healthcare brand partnered with ISITE Design to plan and build a new Find Care mobile experience that would allow subscribers to search for doctors, dentists and pharmacies. 
 

A key challenge with the existing Find Care web application was its inability to elegantly scale to mobile devices. The cumbersome experience was formatted for a wide browser setting and required keyboard inputs. This all added up to a frustrating, non-touch-friendly mobile experience.  Additionally, the main ODS website suffered from many similar mobile compatibility issues.

 

Our mandate quickly came into focus: help ODS design and implement a set of web applications to extend the content and functionality of their two main web properties to mobile devices. This strategy would also aim to utilize the majority of the existing application infrastructure. Key goals included a smooth, natural transition between these two mobile sites, and a new mobile experience for the Find Care application.

 

Our mobile practice group worked to design an experience for the Find Care application tailored to the mobile customer's particular needs. This included streamlined searching with more relevant results, direct access to provider phone numbers and directions, and faster content delivery than a traditional website.

  

We prioritized a targeted list of devices for the ODS customer that included Android, iOS, and Blackberry browsers.  While it’s impractical to design an experience for the thousands of available mobile browsers, we crafted flexible markup language which provides ODS a future-friendly toolkit that remains adaptable to future devices and browsers. 

 

ISITE Design partnered with the ODS web development team to implement the new mobile strategy and Find Care application experience. The collaborative process enabled ODS to focus on integrating the mobile work across its complex in-house web infrastructure, while ISITE Design provided the overall strategy, mobile best practices and user experience design. The result was a mobile web application that better connects subscribers with plan and physician data and enables ODS personnel to maintain ownership of their mobile platform moving forward.