LabCorp
Labcorp is a leading global life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers and patients make clear and confident decisions. They operate one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world, processing over 3 million patient specimens per week across over 160 million patient encounters per year.
4 sprint cycles · ~90% user preference over existing and competitor experiences · All key business metrics met · The new experience absorbed the pandemic's disruption without breaking
A Patient Journey, Finished Just in Time
I led the service-design engagement that took LabCorp's discrete patient touchpoints and treated them as one connected journey. The work created the clarity necessary to design a mobile-first digital experience that increased registered appointments, reduced contact center volume driven by patient confusion, and grew the number of active digital accounts. But, even more importantly, because the project concluded just before the pandemic, the experience we designed for the patient turned out to be exactly the experience LabCorp needed when conditions changed.
The Work
The engagement included stakeholder interviews to ground the strategy, then field research—observation and one-on-one patient interviews—to surface what patients actually experienced. The team documented 13 stages of the patient journey, 56 significant pain points, and 20 unmet patient needs.
In a collaborative workshop, I translated those findings into a prioritized backlog that combined LabCorp's known initiatives with the opportunities the research had surfaced. That backlog became the foundation for design.
I oversaw the design of a mobile-first digital experience across four sprint cycles—Appointments, Billing & Insurance, New Account Creation, and Test Results—later expanded to include the Homepage, Dashboard, and Help Center. Each cycle included user testing and iterative refinement to meet specific experience metrics. Testing showed that the new designs were preferred over existing and competitor experiences by nearly 90% of users. These scores covered both usability and desirability.
Frontstage Impact
Improved appointment scheduling, billing clarity, test results, and account creation across the patient journey
90% user preference over existing and competitor experiences in testing
Backstage Impact
Prioritized opportunity backlog integrating research findings with existing roadmap
Digital infrastructure that enabled rapid pandemic-era patient onboarding
Role
Strategist
Service Design Lead
Key Deliverables
Insights & Opportunities
Patient Journey
Prioritized Backlog
Mobile-First Digital Experience
Sanitized version of the LabCorp patient journey
Prioritized backlog, including existing items and new opportunities from research.
Results
The project hit every key business metric: more appointments booked online (reducing walk-ins), fewer contact-center calls driven by patient confusion, and growth in digital account creation. This is what we initially set out to improve.
Unplanned was a stress test no one had designed for. The project concluded just before the pandemic. When COVID-19 made walk-ins dangerous, digital scheduling urgent, and contact centers overwhelmed, LabCorp had just finished rebuilding the experience around exactly those kinds of needs. The strategy of treating the journey as one connected thing was, of course, good for the patient. It also enabled LabCorp’s to adapt to a crisis few saw coming. When COVID-19 arrived, that work became a lifeline. Because LabCorp had invested in patient-centered digital infrastructure before it was urgent, they were able to serve millions of patients—including for COVID testing—at a moment of life-or-death consequence.
The Takeaway
In my experience, the most valuable thing service design produces isn't just the friction it removes, but the coherence it creates. When the patient experience is treated as one journey rather than a set of unrelated touchpoints, the organization ends up with a system it can operate under stress. When you invest in this kind of work, you’re focused first on helping the people you exist to serve; you’re also making your own organization more adaptive and resilient. Next time you look at your own customer’s experience, factor in this hard-to-calculate benefit that your own organization also receives.