Pfizer: An interactive dashboard for medical coverage

In 2021, Pfizer unveiled its first major rebrand in 70 years, shifting from a legacy pharmaceutical name toward a brand that could lead in the digital space too. Alongside Landor & Fitch, the global brand transformation company, I was brought on as a product designer for four months to help bring that rebrand into an actual product: an interactive coverage calculator that helps doctors show patients exactly how their insurance plan covers a specific medication.

A note on this case study: because this involves a major pharmaceutical brand, real drug safety requirements, and patient-facing healthcare content, I can't show actual production screens or reproduce any clinical or safety copy. What's described here is true to the design problem and the decisions made, without exposing anything that isn't already public.

The problem was well-documented before I ever got involved. Independent research from Bend Financial found that 56% of respondents felt completely lost trying to understand health insurance, and only 3% felt fully confident in it. Pfizer's own coverage charts made that worse instead of better: a wall of tabs like Improved Access, Favorable Access, Plan List, and Medicare LIS, with no room to explain what any of it actually meant for one specific patient.

Designing inside real constraints

Research with the Landor team turned into three questions: how might we make dense coverage details digestible enough for a doctor to hand straight to a patient, how might we turn a generic coverage chart into something personalized, and how might we make it feel less like a brochure and more like a report built for that specific person. The answer had to be interactive, bitesized, fast, and personable, but it also had to survive two constraints that weren't up for debate. Important Safety Information is legally required on every single screen, taking up a fixed share of it, full stop. And the entire tool had to be built to sit inside Veeva, the compliant publishing platform pharmaceutical marketing runs through for medical, legal, and regulatory review, not as a freestanding site.

Those constraints shaped the layout more than any visual decision did. Safety information couldn't be an afterthought in a footer, it had to be a permanent, sized region on every screen. And because the tool needed to move through MLR review inside Veeva, the structure had to stay predictable and componentized rather than custom per screen.

The coverage calculator

The tool let a doctor filter by location, plan type, indication-specific coverage, and patient age, then returned a sortable plan list tagged by access type, Improved Access, Favorable Access, or Medicare LIS, instead of a static table someone had to decode by hand. A feature we called the briefcase let a patient's specific coverage profile get built and saved, turning a generic chart into something closer to a custom report a doctor could hand over in the room. The whole system was piloted on Xtandi, one of Pfizer's oncology treatments, but built so each product could reskin it with its own branding rather than starting from scratch.

What I learned

Every pixel of freedom I had on this project existed inside boundaries set by medical, legal, and regulatory review, not just brand guidelines. That reframed how I thought about constraints generally. The safety information footprint and the Veeva structure weren't obstacles to design around at the end, they were inputs I needed from day one, the same way clearance rules or compliance requirements show up on any regulated project since.