The setting
connects patients, outpatient mental health providers, and health insurers. gives health plans a network of credentialed clinicians who give outpatient mental health care, plus referral links and ways to measure how the network performs.
A directory referral can name a clinician without helping a member judge whether care can happen soon enough.
Members need a clear signal of urgency while clinicians need expectations that their availability can support.
Who you’d be doing this for
“My access team keeps asking what happened after we sent someone to the directory, and I don’t have a clean answer.”
Nega Ndirangu · Behavioral Health Network Executive · a character in this brief
She oversees network adequacy and member access for a health plan that refers members through its provider directory.
What is at stake
Members sent from payer directories cannot tell who might see them soon. You must decide how urgency changes matching without promising availability that clinicians have not confirmed.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- timely access signals vs. availability promises
- member clarity vs. provider burden
- partner evidence vs. journey simplicity
- new interaction patterns vs. co-branded consistency
Why Headway
Payer-directory journeys connect health-plan members to the outpatient clinician network and shape whether access feels real rather than listed.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 104 more at Headway, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Headway. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Senior Product Designer, New Channels · no longer posted
- Create co-branded patient journeys and landing pages, improve provider directory discoverability, and optimize conversion for patients arriving through payer channels.
- This includes our Booking Assistant (BA) tool, referrer-facing dashboards, and new intake flows as we expand to more health systems.
- Principal Product Designer, Payer · no longer posted
- Operate as a group lead in close partnership with Head of payer product and Eng director to define the payer strategy and roadmap.
- You'll lead the design vision and execution for how we support clinical excellence, ensure coding accuracy, and provide meaningful feedback to providers to influence their behavior—all while maintaining the provider experience that makes Headway different.
Reporting read before this brief was written
The pieces closest to the situation in this brief.
In a September 16, 2026 analysis, the National Health Law Program said federal rules require Medicaid managed care plans to meet appointment wait time standards starting in 2027.
States should take action to enforce network adequacy laws for behavioral health access in Medicaid managed care - National Health Law Program (opens in a new tab) · healthlaw.org · Sep 16, 2026
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these is about people starting something and never quite finishing it.
Only 46% of members recommended medication care book a first appointment within seven days.
You have to weigh clearer booking guidance against preserving clinically appropriate routing.
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Affected substance use referrals are being recorded without members reaching a first appointment.
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The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Headway’s Headway for Payers, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Five of eight payer deals contain requests beyond approved proposal language.
You decide whether AI drafts those requests as marked terms or leaves them as questions for the seller.
Six qualified discussions lack agreement on who funds referrals from health systems.
You must weigh a payer's demand for predictable participation against health systems' refusal to guarantee patient volumes.
A payer's expansion now depends on three years of exclusivity across three states.
You must weigh guaranteed contribution against blocked deals while refusing commitments the network cannot substantiate.
Other problems with a similar purpose
In each of these, as in this one, the aim is to make complicated, high-stakes systems feel simple to navigate without quietly removing the protections people depend on.
Cross-surface tasks take a median of 7.4 navigation actions, and support data ties the confusion to delayed production changes.
You have to decide how developers move between workflows, evaluations, connections and deployed agents before deep links and permissions migrate and set that path.
Admins stall at permission validation and destination selection, and many misread what happens when a connection is committed.
You have to settle the interaction model now, because changing it after rollout is costly.
In audit samples, interviewers saw context that some customers do not permit, and the migration runs one way.
You have to keep scorecards structured and auditable while narrowing what interviewers see.
