Overview
As one of the largest independent pharmacy benefit managers in the United States, MedImpact supports over 20 million members and manages more than $40 billion in annual pharmacy transactions.
When we partnered with them, their platform transformation had already produced strong thinking across multiple initiatives, with multiple vendors. What it hadn’t produced was a shared direction. Every time a decision crossed team boundaries, the work stalled.
Before the platform could move forward, the organization needed to answer something more fundamental: what the transformation needed to accomplish first, and who was responsible for making that call.
Through a combined Advisory CX and Fractional CX engagement, we aligned stakeholders, introduced clearer decision-making structures, and translated strategic direction into structured UX and product execution.
In partnership with Sequel
Years of Growth Created Layers of Complexity
As MedImpact expanded through strategic investments and acquisitions, including Bayview and Elixir Solutions, its capabilities grew alongside increasing complexity. Its core technology stack evolved into a collection of independently built and acquired legacy systems, each supporting critical functions but operating with different workflows, experience patterns, and governance models.
This created a fragmented ecosystem with strong local expertise but no unified framework for decision-making across the platform landscape.
Previous transformation efforts surfaced valuable insights and progress across individual initiatives, but they did not establish a cohesive path forward across the broader platform.
Every team understood its piece of the platform. But when decisions crossed team boundaries, there was no clear way to resolve them. That’s what kept the transformation from moving.
Before MedImpact could modernize its digital capabilities or position itself for AI-enabled transformation, it first needed to establish a stable, coherent foundation across its existing systems.
The gap wasn’t vision. It was foundation.
When a platform transformation stalls in a capable organization, the problem is usually not the vision. The teams at MedImpact had deep knowledge of their systems and had invested significantly in building a picture of where the platform could go. What they didn’t have was a shared starting point for decisions that crossed team boundaries.
Four conditions were keeping the work from moving:
- The platform landscape was fragmented across multiple legacy systems, each with different workflows, ownership structures, and governance models.
- Teams had different answers to the same question: what does this platform need to become? Without a shared definition, every planning conversation had to restart from scratch.
- Earlier transformation efforts aimed directly at a “best-in-class” outcome without first addressing foundational gaps, creating sequencing problems that compounded over time.
- Multiple external vendors had contributed over time, but without a unified governance model, their work hadn’t converged into a clear direction.
The gap was no longer vision. It was the foundation needed to make any vision executable.
Once Alignment Existed, Execution Could Move Forward
Advisory CX
Working through existing systems, documentation, and stakeholder sessions, we built a clear picture of why previous transformation efforts hadn’t held.
This helped surface alignment gaps and establish a clearer view of how the platform was operating across teams and systems.
The initial transformation vision aimed to “leapfrog” directly toward a market-leading, AI-enabled self-service platform with integrated workflows and advanced analytics across the ecosystem. However, the advisory process revealed that the organization wasn’t ready to make that leap yet.
This led to a key shift from pursuing a near-term leap to defining a sequenced transformation approach focused first on stabilizing and rationalizing the existing platform.
We helped align stakeholders on this reframing, helping leadership agree on what had to be true first before anything more ambitious could s쳮d.
Fractional CX
With direction established, we moved into a Fractional CX model to support execution at scale.
We put a delivery structure in place that kept design decisions, product direction, and execution aligned so the work didn’t drift back into the same fragmentation the advisory phase had resolved. This created a consistent execution layer between strategy and delivery, ensuring design decisions, system behavior, and product direction remained aligned.
As part of this phase, we developed over 50 wireframes across key workflows, giving teams a concrete shared reference for how the platform should actually work.
From Fragmented Efforts to a More Scalable Path Forward
MedImpact ended the engagement with something it hadn’t had before: a platform direction its teams could describe the same way and execute against without relitigating the same decisions.
- Fragmented legacy systems → A rationalized platform structure teams could navigate, describe, and build against consistently
- Teams relitigating the same decisions → A shared foundation that moved decision-making out of leadership and into the work
- A “leapfrog” vision without foundational readiness → A phased transformation approach: stabilize first, scale advanced capabilities second
- Inconsistent execution across initiatives → Defined governance rhythms and delivery cadence that held through the engagement
- Conceptual strategy → 50+ wireframes translating platform direction into concrete product flows, system behavior, and interaction models
CX by Design brought both the advisory structure to establish direction and the fractional execution capacity to hold it, so the work didn’t drift back into the same fragmentation the advisory phase had resolved.
If your platform transformation has stalled, or you’re about to start one and want to avoid the same scenario, that’s exactly where we start.
