Case Study

Impact stats:

• 28,773,413 enrollees’ claims data has been served by AB2D since June 2025

• 115% increase in average site visitors per month 

Summary

To ensure Medicare enrollees receive high quality care, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is leading efforts to give enrollees and their providers secure access to health care data. Part of this work involves redesigning websites for key application programming interfaces (APIs) that serve Medicare claims data. 

Nava partnered with CMS to redesign the agency’s website for AB2D, an API that provides Prescription Drug Plan Sponsors (PDPs) with Medicare claims data. The revised website improves the overall digital experience for PDPs and the developers who work for them, and makes it easier to find resources on the API, ultimately helping to increase adoption. This is important because AB2D enables PDPs to improve care and medication coordination, identify and monitor how effective treatments are, and aggregate enrollee information in one place. PDPs can also use claims data to detect fraud and abuse, which can inform future policies and procedures.

Approach

To help CMS revise the website content, we leveraged plain language and a content-first approach where content strategy and content design informed the website’s user interface. This enabled CMS to target content gaps and improve the website’s user experience. 

To help CMS develop the website, we built a continuous integration pipeline and used a trunk-based development strategy. This means we used a collaborative development strategy with CMS by merging small, continuous updates to the website in a test environment. This lets developers and designers view and test changes without interrupting each other’s workflows. This practice enabled our team to preview all changes in a single, shareable space. Lastly, we leveraged cloud-based infrastructure to support continuous deployments to the production environment. This approach helped CMS ensure consistency across the production and development sites and avoid unexpected bugs.  

Outcomes

The revised AB2D website includes a new design system, information architecture, and updated website content, all of which improves usability and technical documentation. Non-technical users, like health care providers, can use the website to learn about the API, its use cases, and assess if the API is the right fit for their organization. Technical users, such as developers, can use the website and its documentation to find resources on building API capabilities or to prepare their organizations to start receiving claims data.   

AB2D is not the only API of its nature. CMS operates other APIs that serve Medicare claims data, three of which Nava is working on. Going forward, we’ll help CMS update the websites for the other claims data APIs. The AB2D website redesign is leading the way in establishing a user-tested and maintainable standard for these other websites. 

The processes and templates we helped hone during the AB2D redesign will inform two more API website redesigns. In helping CMS redesign the AB2D website, we focused on standardizing our operations, designs, and workflows as much as possible. For example, we helped CMS leverage the U.S. Web Design System’s (USWDS) best practices and website components to prioritize usability and consistency. We also helped CMS design and test six customizable web page templates and 20 customizable web pages for the API websites. As CMS redesigns the other API websites, they’ll be able to repeat tested processes, providing a faster delivery time and easier long-term website maintenance. 

Process

Making content more user-friendly 

The website redesign started after CMS conducted a study on how to boost adoption and engagement for the AB2D API. Using the study results, we helped CMS assess the current state of the API websites and identify strengths, gaps in content, and opportunities to improve engagement and accessibility. During this process, we also worked with CMS to document what we learned about the people who use the API websites and mapped out their user journeys. This helped CMS identify ways to improve the user experience. 

Next, we worked with CMS staff to develop the website’s information architecture. We approached this by helping CMS conduct user surveys with agency staff. This enabled us to better understand where certain information should live on the website. We then helped CMS build a standardized information architecture they can use across the claims API websites while allowing space for customization. 

With a blueprint in hand, CMS took a content-first approach to building the final website. To start, we helped CMS inventory the old website content and organized it in the new information architecture, confirming the blueprint worked for this use case. Then, we helped CMS audit the content to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Together, we designed a plain-language and accessibility strategy to evaluate the quality of the content and determine which information to keep, revise, remove, or move. Finally, we helped revise and rewrite the content in a primary document with a focus on plain language. During this process, we worked with CMS to develop guidelines for consistent terminology and best plain-language practices across all of the API websites. A developer evaluated the technical documentation for accuracy. 

Designing the new web pages incrementally

We used a collaborative design tool to input the content from the primary document into wireframes, enabling us to explore options for navigation, page layouts, code interactions, and alerts. We relied on USWDS’s standardized and tested website components to determine everything from colors to homepage layout. This allowed us to work quickly, effectively, and with confidence that we were meeting usability requirements. We also helped create design templates for non-technical and documentation web pages for all the claims API websites. The templates, which we tested with users, follow common website navigation. CMS will leverage these coded, customizable templates on other claims API website redesigns. 

We helped CMS design one web page at a time, continuously sharing the pages with technical subject matter experts and CMS’s API product managers and product owners. This enabled us to work quickly while gathering valuable feedback and iterating. After we completed each web page, we helped code the page into the cloud-based development site. Meanwhile, our designers would help CMS mock up the next page’s design. 

Launching the live website

Throughout the development process, we worked with CMS to practice a collaborative development strategy. This enabled us to continuously share the working site with our partners at CMS for feedback. When we needed to iterate, our developers created “branch” sites where they could implement feedback and review changes without affecting the main site. After a review, we merged the changes back to the main development site. During the development process, we helped CMS run automated accessibility and quality assurance tests to catch regressions and prevent bugs. 

Once we helped CMS upload and test all of the pages on the development website, we deployed the updated production site, which uses the same cloud-based infrastructure as the development site. We helped CMS implement a process that would ensure the production site was identical to the latest development site. Leading up to the launch of the live website, we helped CMS conduct a final round of manual accessibility tests and invited people to use the website to test for bugs. 

Conclusion

The AB2D website redesign marks a step forward in API adoption throughout the health care ecosystem and empowers PDPs with claims data to get a holistic overview of Medicare enrollees’ treatment plans. The new website, which prioritizes user-friendly content and technical documentation, helps stakeholders learn about the API, understand its use cases, and start receiving Medicare claims data. We’ll continue partnering with CMS to redesign at least two additional API websites, establishing maintainable plain-language and content standards along the way. 

This report was prepared by Nava. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent an official statement, policy, or endorsement by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.