User Researcher, Patient ExperiencePosition SummaryWe are seeking a User Researcher, Patient Experience to own research across Gifthealth's patient-facing product experiences. This position plays a key role in supporting the Product department and reports to Sr. UX Researcher, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, operational excellence, and compliance standards.
This role works closely with Product and Design throughout the product cycle: identifying what we need to understand before we build, conducting research as ideas take shape, evaluating experiences before they launch, and learning from what happens afterward. A PM should be able to bring this researcher a problem rather than a study brief and trust them to identify the riskiest assumptions in the patient experience, determine what is worth learning, find the right way to learn it, and get the evidence back while there is still time to change the product.
This role may be leveled as Researcher or Senior Researcher based on experience and demonstrated independence. At the Senior level, the researcher independently owns that process end to end. At the Researcher level, they independently own well-bounded work while developing the same judgment on more ambiguous problems with support from the research lead.
Key Responsibilities - Research ownership: Own research across patient-facing experiences including enrollment, checkout, the patient portal, insurance and benefits experiences, patient communications, and new program launches.
- Question framing: Partner with Product and Design to identify the questions and assumptions that matter most before work is built.
- Full-cycle research: Plan and conduct research across the product cycle, from early discovery and concept work through usability and comprehension testing, launch readiness, and post-launch learning, using moderated and unmoderated methods as the question requires.
- Right-sizing: Turn product questions into research approaches that get useful evidence into decisions on the timeline those decisions require.
- Patient recruiting: Recruit and engage patient participants, including from specialty and hard-to-reach populations, in ways that respect healthcare privacy and consent requirements.
- Ongoing understanding: Build a persistent understanding of patient needs, behaviors, expectations, and pain points rather than treating each study as an isolated project.
- Mixed evidence: Connect what patients say and do with behavioral, operational, and quantitative evidence when it produces a stronger answer.
- Synthesis and influence: Synthesize research into clear implications and recommendations teams can act on, and build enough context in the product areas to surface important questions proactively.
Qualifications- Education: Bachelors degree preferred
- Experience: Typically 2 to 5 years of experience conducting user research on digital products or services. Candidates with 5+ years and a track record of independently leading ambiguous research may be leveled as Senior. Healthcare, pharmacy, or patient-access experience is welcome but not required; we care more about the ability to learn the domain quickly.
- Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- High agency: owns the path to an answer, not just the assigned task, and finds the people, evidence, access, or workaround needed to keep moving. Find a way or make one.
- Comfort with ambiguity and speed: moves confidently when the question is messy, the timeline is short, or the evidence is incomplete, and knows how much research the decision actually requires.
- AI-forward: assumes there is usually a faster or deeper way to work with AI and looks for it proactively, with strong judgment about when to trust, verify, or step outside the tool.
- Claim discipline: precise about what the evidence does and does not support, and explicit about meaningful uncertainty.
- Close to decisions: cares more about getting the right evidence into the decision than producing research for its own sake.
- Strong evaluative research craft: usability testing, comprehension and mental model studies, concept evaluation, and unmoderated remote research, with the judgment to choose the method from the question rather than from habit.
- Strong interviewing, facilitation, synthesis, and communication skills, with the ability to make complicated evidence clear without flattening its uncertainty or limitations.
- Experience partnering closely with Product and Design and influencing work while it is still taking shape.
- Comfort working across qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, and operational evidence.
- Preferred: Experience researching products in complex, regulated, or service-heavy environments.
- Preferred: Experience working on products where the digital experience intersects with offline operations or customer support.
- Preferred: Experience establishing recurring research practices around launches or product teams.
Work Environment- Location: Remote (US)
- Schedule: Full-time
- Occasional travel to Gifthealth's Columbus, Ohio offices for team collaboration.
- Regular meetings with the research lead and with Product and Design partners across patient-facing product areas to ensure alignment.
Key Essential Functions - Must be able to work independently and remotely, with reliable internet access and a suitable environment for conducting patient interviews and moderated research sessions.
- Must be able to communicate effectively, verbally and in writing, with patients, Product, Design, and cross-functional partners.
- Must be able to handle sensitive patient information in compliance with healthcare privacy and consent requirements.
- Must be able to travel occasionally to Gifthealth's Columbus, Ohio offices for team collaboration.
Employment ClassificationStatus: Full-time
FLSA: Exempt
Salary Description
145,000-175,000
