Aligning for Action: Optum Serve Capabilities Mapping

The Context

The 2018 VA MISSION Act marked a transformative shift in how veterans access healthcare — expanding their ability to receive care from community providers while aiming to deliver a world-class, seamless customer experience. Following passage of the act, Optum was awarded the contract to build and manage the infrastructure that would support this new model. That solution became Optum Serve.

The Challenge

As part of the broader CX team, we were responsible for championing the voice of the customer — in this case, the veteran — through enterprise collaboration, operational oversight, and innovative, human-centered problem solving. Our team played a critical role in shaping the experience strategy that would support both the VA’s objectives and Optum’s operational execution.

The Approach

I led a team that facilitated working sessions with cross-functional stakeholders to align on the overall service design. From there, we developed personas and journey maps that highlighted experience gaps, proactively surfaced potential pain points, and guided solution design.

These deliverables helped stakeholders across the organization align around a shared understanding of the veteran and provider experience — and ultimately shaped the delivery of products and services that met the high bar set by the MISSION Act.

This work supported not only beneficiary experience excellence, but also strengthened Optum’s relationship with the VA and elevated the enterprise value of Optum Serve.

Related Press Release

Department of Veteran Affairs, December 28, 2018 — VA awards Community Care Network contracts to increase health care access

Sample Deliverables

Below are three artifacts from the project: veteran personas developed to ground the team in real user needs, a persona-specific journey map tracing the community care referral experience, and the VA CCN Medical Provider Experience map illustrating the end-to-end provider onboarding journey.