Walmart’s Pharmacy Pricing Platform
Product design for a data analytics dashboard to track pharmacy pricing initiatives.
My Role
Product Designer
Team
Design, Product, Engineering, Business
Tools
Figma, Zoom, Miro
Timeline
2-months
The Challenge
For decades, Walmart Pharmacy has utilized an outdated legacy platform and many offline processes to manage prices for products in the pharmacy. As a recent initiative, the Pharmacy Pricing Platform was created to automate and respond quickly to changes in the cost of products. As part of this initiative, Pharmacy Pricing Managers needed a way to test special pricing initiatives and track the performance of those initiatives. Pricing Managers were spending hours compiling and analyzing data in Excel, which was burdensome and challenging to manage.
The Outcome
Through a collaborative design process working closely with our Pharmacy Pricing Managers, I designed the data analytics dashboard that enabled the Pricing Managers to create and track the performance of their special pricing initiatives. This dashboard resulted in an increased ability to quickly share the impact of their work with business stakeholders and to track and intervene quickly if a pricing initiative wasn't performing as expected.
Business Needs
1.
Give Pricing Managers quick and intuitive access to the metrics that matter to them.
2.
Reduce the amount of time it takes Pricing Managers to analyze the impact of their pricing initiatives.
3.
Provide Pricing Managers with visual representations of pricing performance to share with stakeholders.
4.
Provide transparency and consistency as to how performance metrics are calculated and shared with stakeholders.
User Research
The world of pharmacy pricing is something that I knew nothing about before working on this project which highlighted the utmost need to immerse myself with user research and to involve the Pharmacy Pricing Managers every step of the way.
I began this project by interviewing several Pharmacy Pricing Managers independently to understand their current pain points in calculating and sharing the metrics that matter, how having access to data impacts their ability to do their job, and potential magic wand solutions.
Key Insights
➡️ In the complex landscape of medical health plans, Pricing Managers spend 95% of their time optimizing pricing based on PBM contracts and through adjudication rather than on cash prices for drugs.
➡️ Only 10-15% of pharmacy purchases are made with cash, so Pricing Managers focus on optimizing for higher reimbursements rather than on higher cash rates.
➡️ Pharmacy reimbursement rates are complicated to track. To find and optimize for maximum reimbursement, it's up to the Pricing Managers to find opportunities based on individual PBM contracts and then monitor how a pricing strategy is performing and if it should be adjusted.
➡️ Financial upside was being lost due to the burdensome data analysis and could be more nimbly accessed through automated and ongoing access to data via the dashboard
Participatory Design
Given the highly collaborative nature of this project with the end user, I regularly met, brainstormed, and sought clarification on their needs as I designed. With their ongoing input, we evolved the dashboard through several iterations, from basic information architecture to sketches on my iPad, wireframes, and later to high-fidelity designs.
Walmart Design Patterns
Brand and design consistency is highly valued at Walmart, even for associate-facing tools and products. As such, I spent hours researching and connecting with other designers who worked on data visualization tools within Walmart. These design patterns helped inform certain component styles and formats that I used when designing the pricing dashboard.
Handoff and Implementation
Once we had been through several rounds of review and feedback with design and business stakeholders, I worked with my engineering partners to document and annotate the expected behavior of the new pharmacy dashboard. During the rollout of the dashboard, we had to make specific changes to features, such as the filters, given the complexity of the data and how quickly it could be segmented and displayed in the UI.
Outcomes
The creation of this dashboard addressed the core business, and user needs to:
1.Give Pricing Managers quick and intuitive access to the metrics that matter to them.
2. Reduce the time it takes Pricing Managers to analyze the impact of the pricing actions.
3. Provide Pricing Managers with visual representations of pricing performance to share with stakeholders.
4. Provide transparency and consistency regarding how performance metrics are calculated and shared with stakeholders.
Our main business stakeholder has estimated that the time savings have equated to roughly half an FTE role in terms of time saved and has enabled his team to focus on high-impact opportunities for pricing optimization. As a result of various features on the Pricing Platform, the team is on track for $125M+ in gross profit in FY23.