ROME
Ordering Platform

Novartis Patient Services brought ROME under a larger enterprise umbrella. A second product, the Access Portal, was added in front of it. Access Portal is where healthcare providers enroll patients into the ecosystem and begin their treatment journey.

I was given the paper START form and a one-week deadline. The deadline reflected the state of the program. Business priorities kept shifting, stakeholders went back and forth, and nobody had a clear picture of the whole thing. They needed an MVP they could align on and use to secure resources as quickly as possible.

Neither the front-end nor back-end teams had been staffed. Salesforce had just been introduced to the project.

The goal was to define enough of the experience that engineering could begin on day one.

The request was to digitize the START form, but I knew Access Portal needed more than a digital form. At a minimum, it needed a sign-in, a homepage, and an enrollment flow. With only a week, I kept the scope deliberately small.

Salesforce had already been selected, so I used SLDS2 out of the box with no custom components. It was faster to design against, and it meant engineering could build from stock components instead of specs I had invented.

The paper START form became my blueprint. I reverse engineered it, removed duplicate fields that appeared throughout the document, and reorganized the information around how providers naturally think about the patient rather than how the paperwork was processed internally.

Patient information came first, then patient insurance, then prescriber information. The two attestations went at the end, together. On paper, one of them sat in the middle of the document, so checking it meant jumping back through the form.

I then split the experience into a multi-step flow that followed that same progression.

I expanded the scope around the form. Inside the form, I followed the paper further than I meant to.

The paper START form was the only source material I had, and I stayed close to it. Save as Draft wasn't part of the document because paper doesn't need it. You put a paper form down when you get interrupted and pick it back up where you left off.

The form I designed had multiple steps. I forgot Save as Draft.

It came up after launch. Providers get interrupted constantly. A patient conversation, a phone call, insurance information they don't have on hand. They start the form, get pulled away, and come back later. Without a way to save, coming back meant starting over.

It became one of the first features added after the MVP. Digitizing the experience took away something paper gave users for free, and I stayed close enough to the source material that I didn't notice it was gone.

As the sister platform was being built on Salesforce Design System 2, an opportunity emerged. Rather than adding more duct tape and patchwork, I consolidated ROME and SLDS 2 into a single source of truth, creating a shared enterprise design system through a phased migration that minimized disruption while supporting ongoing product delivery.

Why a phased approach?

A full redesign wasn’t realistic. Product wanted a consistent experience, engineering couldn’t absorb the scope, and the business couldn’t pause feature delivery. Working closely with engineering, I prioritized global components and the most frequently used pages first, creating a phased migration that balanced all three.

UAT uncovered an average of ~35 UI issues per sprint during redesign. Findings ranged from minor inconsistencies to broken interactions that prevented user progression. Every issue entered the engineering queue with the same priority.

Without a shared way to evaluate UI quality, discussions increasingly shifted from fixing problems to debating ownership and severity.

To address this, I created a UI Quality Framework that prioritized issues based on user impact, frequency, and visual severity. Clear definitions, examples, and weekly review sessions gave design, engineering, and UAT a shared standard for evaluating UI issues and determining what should be fixed immediately, deferred, or accepted.