MTM - Caregiver Portal

Designing a new caregiver experience that enables parents and guardians to manage medical transportation for their dependents.

Project overview

MTM, Inc. provides non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) services, helping members schedule rides to healthcare appointments. As the lead designer for this initiative, I designed MTM's first Caregiver Portal, a new web and mobile experience that allows caregivers to manage transportation on behalf of eligible dependents. MTM’s Member Self-Service platform allowed members to schedule and manage medical transportation, but only for themselves. Feedback from members, call center representatives, and health plan partners revealed an opportunity to expand the platform to parents and legal guardians who needed to manage transportation for multiple dependents.

I led the end-to-end design of the caregiver experience, including the caregiver registration flow, the caregiver portal, and the internal tools used by MTM's call center representatives to manage caregiver relationships. The solution enables members to register as caregivers and manage transportation requests for up to five eligible minor dependents covered under the same health plan.

My Role

As the lead designer, I owned the end-to-end UX/UI design of the Caregiver Portal.

• Led UX/UI design from discovery through final designs

• Collaborated with product, engineering, and stakeholders throughout the project

• Conducted usability testing and iterated based on feedback

• Created user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs

• Designed the caregiver registration experience

• Designed the web and mobile Caregiver Portal

• Designed supporting tools for call center representatives

Defining the Experience

Because the Caregiver Portal was a brand-new product, there were no existing workflows to build upon. I worked closely with product managers, stakeholders, engineers, and health plan partners to define the product from the ground up by establishing the business rules, permissions, and user experience that would support both caregivers and internal users.

Determining Eligibility
To simplify the initial launch while meeting the needs of the largest user group, we limited eligibility to parents and legal guardians who were enrolled in the same health plan as their eligible minor dependents. This approach addressed the majority of caregiver requests while reducing implementation complexity.

Establishing Permissions
Once a caregiver relationship was verified, caregivers were given the same transportation management capabilities available to members managing their own care. They could schedule rides, cancel transportation requests, edit ride itineraries, create recurring transportation schedules, and view upcoming and completed trips.

Managing Multiple Dependents
Working with our health plan partners, we determined that allowing caregivers to manage up to five eligible minor dependents would support the overwhelming majority of use cases while keeping the experience simple and scalable for the initial release.

Protecting Privacy and Security
Because caregivers would have access to sensitive member information, eligibility verification was critical. Caregivers could register through the portal, but access was only granted after their information was validated against records provided by MTM's health plan partners. Once verified, caregivers could securely view transportation details, health plan coverage information, HIPAA-protected member information, and transportation history for their eligible dependents.

Creating a Connected Experience
The Caregiver Portal was designed as a seamless extension of MTM's existing ecosystem. I designed responsive web and mobile experiences for caregivers while also creating the internal tools used by call center representatives to establish and manage caregiver relationships. This ensured members received a consistent experience whether they managed transportation themselves, used the Caregiver Portal, or contacted MTM's support team.

Design Principles

The central design challenge became:
How might we empower caregivers to manage transportation for eligible dependents while protecting member privacy, preventing unauthorized access, and maintaining a simple, intuitive user experience?

Before exploring interface concepts, I worked with stakeholders to define the core principles that would guide every design decision. The experience needed to feel like a natural extension of the existing Member Self-Service platform while introducing an entirely new user role. Every feature and workflow was evaluated against these principles to ensure the product remained intuitive, secure, and scalable.

• Empower caregivers without increasing complexity.
  Allow caregivers to manage transportation without making the experience feel fundamentally different from the existing member portal.

• Protect member privacy.
  Clearly distinguish caregiver permissions while ensuring only eligible dependents can be managed.

• Maintain a familiar experience.
  Reuse patterns from the existing Member Self-Service platform whenever possible to reduce the learning curve and maintain system continuity.

• Support multiple user groups.
  Design a cohesive experience for caregivers, dependents, and call center representatives while maintaining consistency across every touchpoint.

Designing the Registration flow

The Problem
Caregiver access introduced a completely new user type to the platform. Before caregivers could manage transportation for dependents, the system needed a secure way to establish and verify caregiver relationships without making registration feel overwhelming.

My Approach
To create a familiar experience, I modeled the registration process after MTM's existing Member Self-Service registration flow while introducing the additional information required to verify caregiver eligibility.

The experience guides users through:

• Creating a caregiver account

• Providing identifying information to find eligible dependents

• Confirming successful registration

I validated the registration flow through multiple rounds of usability testing with 10 participants, beginning with low-fidelity wireframes to evaluate task flows and information architecture before refining the experience with high-fidelity prototypes. Feedback from these sessions informed design iterations that improved clarity, reduced friction, and increased confidence throughout the registration process.

Managing dependents

The Problem
Once caregivers were verified, they needed an easy way to manage multiple dependents without losing track of whose transportation they were viewing or editing.

My Approach
I designed the caregiver dashboard around a calendar view that allows caregivers to quickly:

• Switch between dependents

• View transportation history

• Schedule rides

• Manage recurring transportation

• Edit existing services

The experience reused navigation patterns from the existing Member Self-Service portal to minimize the learning curve while clearly indicating which dependent was currently being managed.

Supporting Internal Users

The Problem
Launching the caregiver experience required more than a customer-facing portal. MTM’s call center representatives also needed the ability to locate caregivers, verify relationships, and manage caregiver accounts while assisting members over the phone. Without internal tools designed around these new workflows, supporting caregivers would become slower and more error-prone.

My Approach
I designed internal workflows that gave call center representatives the information and actions they needed to confidently support caregivers. The experience focused on making caregiver relationships easy to understand while reducing the number of steps required to complete common support tasks.

The designs included capabilities for:

• Looking up caregiver accounts

• Viewing linked dependents and caregiver relationships

• Managing permissions and account access

• Updating caregiver and dependent information when appropriate

• Providing audit history where needed to improve accountability and troubleshooting

The goal was to ensure the internal experience complemented the caregiver portal so that both caregivers and customer care representatives could complete tasks efficiently.

Outcome & reflection

The Caregiver Portal introduced a new capability to MTM’s digital ecosystem, allowing verified caregivers to independently manage medical transportation for eligible dependents. The experience extended across web, mobile, and internal call center tools to create a connected experience for both caregivers and the representatives supporting them.

The project delivered:

• A new self-service experience for caregivers

• Web and mobile tools for managing multiple dependents

• Internal tools for managing caregiver relationships

• A scalable foundation for expanding caregiver access in the future

Given the project's timeline and available research resources, usability testing focused on the caregiver registration flow, which we identified as a critical entry point into the experience. I conducted multiple rounds of testing using both low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes, with a different group of participants for each round. These sessions uncovered usability issues early, validated key decisions, and informed iterations before development. The caregiver portal and call center representative experiences were not formally tested during this phase, creating an opportunity for future research to validate and refine those workflows.

My biggest takeaway was the value of defining product principles early. Establishing clear rules around eligibility, permissions, privacy, and consistency helped guide design decisions and create an experience that could scale as the product evolved.