Case Study: Clinical Account Management & Processing
Overview
Behind every clinical trial is a network of thousands of doctors, nurses, investigators, coordinators, and administrators, each of whom needs the right system access to do their job. Managing those accounts at Eli Lilly meant keeping track of who had access, what their role was, whether that access was active, and whether anything had gone wrong.
Before the Clinical Account Management & Processing project (CAMP), the process for managing these accounts involved more than half a dozen different Excel templates, maintained manually, often consuming the majority of someone’s role. CAMP was a single, unified platform that consolidated every account, across many clinical trials, into one purpose- built tool. This allowed for a significant decrease in the time and effort required to maintain this vast amount of data, as well as mitigated compliance and oversight risks.
Design Lead - Sole UX Designer and Researcher
Multi-year Project - 2023-2024
25+ Team of Devs, PMs, Directors
The Problem
The core issue was simply time spent managing and tracking down information in a disjointed innefficient ecosystem. Lilly's employees were managing thousands of accounts across hundreds of active trials with no single unified database showing a reliable confirmation of account status.
This created a cascade of downstream problems:
Time drain: Account managers spent the majority of their working hours organizing, cross- referencing, and reconciling data between templates.
No single source of truth: With data spread across multiple files, it was nearly impossible to get a reliable, real-time view of account statuses across sites, countries, and studies.
Error-prone processes: Manual entry across multiple files created inconsistencies and errors that were difficult to catch and even harder to trace back.
No audit trail: There was no reliable way to track when an account was requested, when access was granted, or when something went wrong. This is critical information in a regulated clinical environment.
Stale status data: There was no way to see how long an account had been sitting in a particular state, making it difficult to prioritize follow-ups or flag blocked accounts.
For an organization operating in a highly regulated industry, these were significant compliance and oversight risks in addition to being a mess of inefficiency and time loss.
My Role: Lead Designer and Researcher
I was the sole UX designer embedded in a large cross-functional team of 20+ developers, multiple product managers/owners, and associate directors. I was responsible for the end-to- end design process: from discovery and user research through wireframing, high-fidelity visual design, and final handoff to development.
Working as the only designer on a team of this size presented challenges of communication, decision-making, and support. I was often tasked with convincing stakeholders why a researched-informed process is crucial to creating a successful product, many times with pushback and questioning of why our team should spend the time ironing out design details previously overlooked by the team before I joined.
Design Process
Discovery
Stakeholder alignment, gathering requirements, scoping the problem space with product and engineering leads.
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Research
Led user interviews and conducted workshops directly with the future users of CAMP.
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Synthesis
Converted raw workshop findings into a prioritized feature list that included Status, Filtering, Account Management, Errors, and Exporting.
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Wireframing
Translated prioritized features into low-fidelity wireframes, testing layout and information hierarchy while gathering feedback from the team.
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Visual Design
Produced high-fidelity designs covering all key user flows, ready for developer handoff.
Research
Rather than relying on second-hand requirements from product managers, I led structured workshops directly with the people who would use CAMP every day. These sessions served two purposes: to surface the real pain points of the existing spreadsheet workflow, and to give users agency in shaping what came next.
The workshops were organized around the core feature areas of the platform. For each area, participants described their current process, identified what was missing, and prioritized what mattered most. This gave us not just a wish list, but a ranked, user-validated backlog.
What We Heard:
The clearest theme across every session was visibility. Users didn't know what they didn't know. Without a unified view, they couldn't tell at a glance which accounts were active, which were stuck, or which sites were ready to enroll patients. Every answer required juggling spreadsheet templates while sometimes waiting days to hear back from key stakeholders.
Key insights from the workshops included:
Users needed to determine account status at the individual account level, with color-coded indicators and a legend so they could scan hundreds of rows quickly.
Date milestones were important to users. Not just whether something was requested, but how long ago. An account requested on the 1st of the month that hadn't moved was a very different situation from one requested the day before.
Filtering was a daily need, and the existing tools did not provide this ability. Users wanted multi-select filters across site number, study, study role, account status, country, user name, and email.
Audit trails were a significant requirement. In a regulated environment, users needed to know the full history of every account: when access was requested, granted, and deactivated, and who had what role at what time.
Errors needed explanation. When an account ended up in an error state, users needed to understand why and not just that something had failed.
Export capability was essential. Users needed to pull filtered views of the data outside the platform in order to further analyze the data with more sophisticated tools.
Design Features
Status at a Glance
One of the highest-priority workshop findings was the need to quickly identify account status across thousands of rows. The solution was a color-coded status system with a persistent legend allowing users to scan the table and immediately understand the state of any account without reading individual cell values.
Filtering That Works at Scale
With potentially thousands of accounts to sift through, detailed filtering was a core functionality. The design supported simultaneous multi-select filtering across every major data dimension: site, study, role, status, country, user name, and email with pagination settings allowing users to control how many rows they viewed at once.
Audit Trails & Accountability
Because CAMP operates in a regulated clinical environment, every action needed to be traceable. The platform surfaced audit data directly in the account view including last login date, when access was granted, when it was requested, and when it was deactivated. Previous roles were also surfaced, not just current ones, giving a full historical picture of each account's lifecycle.
Error Transparency
When accounts entered an error state, the old workflow gave users no explanation. CAMP was designed to surface the reason for each error directly alongside the account, with a maintained audit trail even after the error was resolved. This made troubleshooting faster and gave operations teams the documentation they needed for compliance purposes.
Outcome
CAMP was launched in mid-2024 with a few pilot trials, and quickly expanded to include dozens of clinical trials before the end of the year. This product consolidated the work previously spread across disparate Excel templates into a single, unified platform. What had been a full-time job of data organization became a streamlined workflow within a purpose- built tool.
Lilly continues to add trials to the platform, managing accounts across Lilly's ecosystem. The shift from disconnected spreadsheets to a live, filterable, auditable database represents a fundamental change in how the team operates with the visibility and control that would not be possible to achieve without CAMP.
