Healthcare has no Disney, Nike or Amazon — no brand people trust to look out for them. Patients may love their doctor or hospital, but no insurance company, payment vendor or lending platform is perceived as caring about the patient at all.
That gap was Parasail's opportunity: make healthcare's first trusted payments brand by empathizing with the patient at every step of the business side of care.
Patients were frustrated with every part of healthcare billing. With so many problems to solve, which one — solved first — would drive the highest engagement with the broadest audience?
Qualitative interviews mapped patients' journeys, setbacks and frustrations. A general-population survey (96% accuracy) ranked pain points by age, income, insurance status, credit score and more, and defined user cohorts and journey maps. They revealed one key moment — when patients realize how much they'll pay out of pocket — where our product and message were most relevant. So we designed the UX around it.
With the CEO and the VPs of Engineering and Partnerships, I turned eight user profiles into a product vision, technology stack and simplified roadmap — plus a brand architecture so every product experience built the brand.
Distilled into an investor pitch deck and iterated for each VC, the focus, traction and clear strategy helped Parasail raise over $18M in seed funding and secure more than $400M in lending capital commitments.
Product launches
We built the MVP of Product 1, a loan application, in about a month. It was ugly, but it gave us real user insight. Weekly agile sprints over the next three months pushed completion past 90% of applicants who started — in an industry where about 40% abandon.
Meanwhile the website grew from a simple MVP funnel into a site routing patients to six different payment products, with brand, messaging and tools mapped to every stage of the journey: online research, front-desk check-in, the bill itself and follow-up calls.
An empathy journey map grounded the user flow in the patient's state of mind at each step — where they'd be frustrated, impatient or willing to engage. ProPatient offered the world's first 0% APR payment plans spanning more than a year, so the (complicated) approval flow kept giving positive feedback to patients arriving from a trusted hospital or doctor.
Our research ranked price transparency as healthcare's biggest headache: patients — and their doctors — rarely know what care will cost until the bill arrives. So we built a free out-of-pocket calculator. Patients scan their insurance card and see what they still owe before insurance covers 100%, then estimate costs for plain-language scenarios, from an ankle sprain to a heart attack.
It was designed as a funnel, not just a tool: the exposure number creates the moment a patient starts researching a payment plan, an email-capture offer sits on every screen, and results can be shared with a spouse or doctor to spread the app. We planned its API integration with our first hospital customer, then tested concepts with real users on InVision and UserTesting.com before building.
With the Head of Sales we built the enterprise funnel in HubSpot — lead scoring, marketing automation and self-serve white papers, sell sheets and demo requests — so a two-person sales team onboarded more than 3,000 providers in 12 months.
An admin estimator tool checked a patient's insurance eligibility and sent a cost estimate with payment-plan options straight from the doctor's office. And because patients didn't pay bills they couldn't understand, we prototyped a redesigned medical bill that made what they owed — and why — clear.
We expanded the agency's core brand guide into a full style guide for freelancers, partners and affiliates. SEO work began eight months before paid media and delivered 40% of unique visitors organically within 18 months, cutting lead-generation costs. Weekly DTC tests across AdWords, YouTube and Facebook optimized targeting, messaging and creative to bring down cost-per-acquisition.
