Where can we improve our patients’ experience in an extremely competitive environment?

A prominent Texas healthcare provider, engaged my team for guidance on the top areas to improve the customer journey before, during and after the exam. While they had top industry rankings, they wanted to ensure their competition could not leapfrog them in the near and far future. The healthcare provider relied on my team to create a generative research plan that would identify habits, pain points, and opportunities for family medicine, orthopedic and cardiology patients.

Activities
  • Kickoff Workshop
  • Contextual Inquiry
  • Affinity Diagramming
  • Wall Walk
  • Behavioral Personas
  • Current and Future State Journey Maps
  • Opportunity Prioritization Workshop
  • Case Study
  • Healthcare
  • Engagement Type
  • B2C

Approach

The timeline did not allow us to spend months with patients, nor did it allow us to directly observe exam room procedures. Instead we conducted on-site sessions with patients immediately after their exam experiences. We visited twelve cardiovascular, orthopedic and family medicine patients at six different provider locations in context.

We also spent several days in waiting rooms just observing the day-to-day activities of the facilities which allowed our researchers to gain a better perspective of the current healthcare experience.

From this research, I was able to:

  • Identify the patient’ common and unique challenges and sentiments
  • Build a deep understanding of the patients’ end-to-end processes
  • Identify opportunity areas for improving and expanding healthcare offerings – Ex. Patients have a great experience once they are with their provider in the exam room, it is the stressors that happen BEFORE and AFTER the visit the provider needed to improve.
A patient showing me a part of the app that does not allow them to group her family in one parent account

Data Synthesis

  • Reviewed and added context for all 1200 data points gathered to prep for synthesis activities
  • Leveraged Affinity diagramming – Organized data captured to reveal common issues, themes and opportunities
  • Conducted a ‘Wall Walk’ of the data and themes to allow stakeholders to discover and internalize user understanding. Ex – many stakeholders did not realize patients had no knowledge of the providers pharmacy department.

Output

By translating research insights into actionable opportunities, I was able to provide our client the information necessary to improve the existing experience and plan for growth in the healthcare industry. I worked directly with the client to determine the fidelity of deliverables for their internal design, development and marketing teams.

  • We created 4 distinct behavioral-based user personas, 3 existing and future state journey maps, an opportunity matrix that ranked opportunities by value to patient, value to business and development ease of implementation.
  • We created detailed opportunity action plan roadmap so they knew how to forecast future enhancements to their existing applications and business processes.
  • We recommended a testing cadence to ensure new features and functions met and exceeded the expectations of patients.

To this day, the healthcare provider is following our recommendations and rolling out new features to the delight of their patients.