CHG Healthcare

CHG Healthcare is the largest locum tenens staffing company in the United States, connecting physicians with temporary clinical placements across the country. During my internship, I worked on the Global Medical Staffing (GMS) Portal, a centralized platform providing access to Global Medical providers with a unified experience for managing their entire locum tenens journey.

My primary focus was the provider application redesign, a lengthy, multi-section credentialing form that physicians complete before going on assignment. The redesign introduced responsiveness, autosaving, and improved error handling to reduce friction and drop-off throughout the process. By the end of my internship, the designs were finalized and handed off to the portal design team, then passed to engineering for development over the following business quarters.

Locum tenens physicians are constantly on the move, taking temporary assignments at hospitals and clinics across the country. Before they can begin any assignment, they go through an extensive credentialing process: filling out personal information, education history, licenses, work history, insurance, and more. The old application was a single, continuous scroll spanning 30 to 40 pages of information with no way to save progress or navigate between sections. Providers were abandoning mid-form and losing everything.

Global Medical providers also had no unified home. They were navigating multiple disconnected systems just to manage a single assignment, creating unnecessary cognitive load on top of an already demanding profession.

We needed to understand where the most significant bottlenecks were occurring. Usage data across the portals painted a clear picture of where providers were struggling and where placements were stalling.

These challenges created significant friction for providers, which hugely impacted their efficiency and overall satisfaction.

With the problem space defined, the work shifted to alignment and discovery. I collaborated closely with business analysts and product managers to align with business goals, specifically increasing the number of providers placed on assignments.

Working cross-functionally, I joined alignment sessions with BAs and PMs to map business goals to design decisions. The core objective was clear: get more providers credentialed and placed on assignments faster. Those sessions were where scope decisions got made: what was in for this quarter, what got pushed, and what tradeoffs engineering could realistically support. Having a seat at that table early meant the designs I brought into review were already grounded in what was buildable, not just what was ideal.

To understand the frustrations providers face firsthand, I conducted empathy mapping exercises and user interviews. These sessions surfaced recurring themes: confusion around required fields, anxiety about losing progress mid-form, and frustration with generic error messages that offered no actionable guidance.

Since we couldn't run usability testing directly with providers during the internship, I validated designs through structured design reviews and a heuristics evaluation session I hosted with my design manager, a few other designers, and my PM. Walking through the interface against established heuristics alongside people with different lenses (product, engineering, brand) surfaced gaps and assumptions I wouldn't have caught on my own. It also gave stakeholders early visibility into decisions before anything was finalized.

Before any screens were designed, GMS needed its own visual identity. I audited the existing style libraries across CHG's portals (CompHealth and Weatherby) to understand the product family, then worked with my design manager and brand marketing to define a style that was distinctly GMS while staying consistent with CHG's broader ecosystem.

Every color decision went through an accessibility review. I validated color contrast ratios against WCAG standards with my design manager and brand marketing before anything was finalized. For typography, I evaluated several options including Figtree, Satoshi, and Inter, and presented them alongside CHG's original brand font. The original was more rigid and constrained for a form-heavy interface. After alignment sessions with design leadership and brand, we landed on Inter for its legibility, flexible weight range, and clean fit with medical credentialing forms.

The work touched four areas, each directly tied to friction points uncovered in research. Together, they reduced the cognitive load of credentialing and made the path to placement meaningfully shorter.

The provider application was the highest-priority project because it was a direct business need: getting providers credentialed and placed on assignments faster translates directly to placements and revenue. Research pointed clearly at the interface as a major friction point. The old form was a single, unbroken scroll across 30 to 40 pages of credentialing fields. No progress indicator, no section navigation, no save. Providers were losing hours of work to a closed tab.

The redesigned application breaks that same information into a structured, step-by-step form with clear section indicators, required field markers, and contextual helper text guiding providers through each step without ambiguity.

Providers complete credentialing from wherever they are, often on a phone between assignments. Usage data showed roughly 20 to 25% of medical providers were already attempting to fill out the application on mobile, making responsiveness a requirement, not a nice-to-have.

I worked closely with engineers to understand the technical constraints, then tested across breakpoints to determine how many input fields could comfortably fit at each screen width. For a form this dense, the number of fields visible without scrolling was a real UX decision, not just a layout one. The result was a layout that adapts gracefully from desktop to mobile without sacrificing form clarity.

One of the most requested improvements from providers was the ability to save progress. I again worked closely with engineers to understand the technical constraints, then designed an autosave system that quietly persists form state as providers move through sections. The "Saving..." indicator eliminates anxiety about losing progress, and providers can return to the application across multiple sessions without starting over.

Providers managing multiple simultaneous assignments needed a clear, low-friction way to log time, but GMS routes time entry to third-party platforms, adding a layer of complexity. I explored four approaches before landing on one that balanced familiarity, context, and clarity.

This internship was as much about building relationships as it was about building interfaces. Working in a large enterprise environment meant that good design required strong cross-functional alignment with business analysts, product managers, and engineers before a single pixel moved.

The biggest lesson: rapport is a design tool. The more trust I built with stakeholders, the more latitude I had to advocate for the provider experience. Hosting the heuristics evaluation session was a turning point in that respect. Putting myself in the facilitator seat for a group of designers, my PM, and my design manager pushed me to articulate design decisions in terms of principles and user goals, not personal preference. The designs got sharper and the relationships got stronger at the same time.

That said, I'd do some things differently if I were starting over.