Magellan Complete Care
A Medicaid member portal for people with serious mental illness, redesigned around how they actually live — not how the health care system assumes they do.
The portal was built for a member who didn't exist.
How might we redesign the member website so members can understand and use their program effectively?
Magellan Complete Care of Florida is a specialty Medicaid health plan for people diagnosed with a serious mental illness: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression. Twenty-six percent of the Medicaid population carries one of these diagnoses, and their lives rarely follow the patterns that health care systems are built around. A significant portion are transient or homeless. Forty percent have no phone number on file. Few have regular internet access.
The existing member portal assumed a user who was stable, connected, and self-directed. Plan details were buried in a member handbook even MCC staff had trouble locating. Members couldn't view their care team, change their assigned providers, complete their Health Risk Assessment online, or update their own contact information. Caregivers and care representatives, who often acted on members' behalf, were an afterthought.
Interviews, focus groups, analytics, call center data. Then we read the research.
The research started with the people who knew the members best. Interviews and focus groups with MCC business staff and subject matter experts mapped the full scope of what members and care teams were actually running into. That fieldwork was combined with surveys, site analytics, and call center statistics. The calls told a particular story, because they were the workaround members used when the portal failed them.
The findings went into a Problem Highlights Document that organized issues by member journey stage: enrollment, understanding the program, accessing services, staying on track, resolving problems. Each problem was paired with a specific proposed portal fix.
Ethnographic research surfaced the finding that changed the design direction entirely: the actual member — someone like Dorothy, living under a bridge in Melbourne with no phone and no stable address — was not the portal's primary user. Caregivers, care workers, and MCC staff were. They were the ones logging in, setting members up, trying to update contact information the system wouldn't let them change, and completing Health Risk Assessments over the phone because the online process required extended time that members couldn't sustain.
A full stakeholder map documented the network: member demographics, living situations, technology access, Magellan internal roles, third parties, and the full provider network. The map made visible what the existing portal had ignored.
A portal designed for who actually shows up.
The redesigned portal shifted its primary frame from member to caregiver and MCC staff — while still creating a usable path for members when they had access. Navigation was reorganized around how members actually used the program, not how the system assumed they would.
For new members, a Get Started section walked through everything needed to activate the program: how to view the welcome packet, print an ID card, complete a Health Risk Assessment online with incremental save, and find assigned providers. All the steps that had previously required a phone call or a staff member driving to someone's last known address.
Members could now view and change their assigned providers and pharmacy, update contact information as often as their living situation required, check claims and authorizations, and file complaints or appeals without picking up a phone. The portal was also redesigned to work across the full range of how members access technology: mobile-optimized for those with a trackphone and limited minutes, usable from a library or community center computer, and structured so caregivers could get to the information they needed without extra access hurdles.
The redesigned member portal welcome screen: priority actions surfaced immediately, no login required to access basic benefit information, and a Get Started path built around how new members actually enter the program.
The redesigned member portal welcome screen: priority actions surfaced immediately, no login required to access basic benefit information, and a Get Started path built around how new members actually enter the program.