Patient Support - Senior Service Designer
The challenge
Evaluate a piloted service to identify staff and patient pain points, highlight workflow challenges as well as process breakdowns, to ultimately inform the direction of the service supporting technology.
A healthcare company recently piloted a service where staff support patients using multiple communication channels. They wanted to streamline workflows and identify which direction to take the supporting technology and platforms.
Approach and methods
Interview patient supporting staff, observe live staff/patient interactions, and map out existing processes, systems, and workflows. Document what’s happening now, ideate the ideal future, and use that to drive the roadmap for the supporting technology.
It all begins with research. Patient supporting staff were interviewed and observed to understand their current use of the systems, behaviors, and identify where the processes broke down.
Detailed findings were pulled together highlighting the difficulties for the staff, while their specific interactions with the supporting technology were mapped out, showcasing the pain.
Ideal workflows and processes were built, highlighting opportunities for integrations and reduction of systems touched. A final workshop evaluated the feasibility, cost, and experience of the options for technology moving forward.
Key learnings
Purposeful work may overshadow painful processes, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be that way.
After mapping out the everyday interactions of the patient supporting staff, I was shocked by how much the existing technology was impacting their ability to connect with and interact with patients. However I was even more surprised by how much it didn’t bother the staff at all.
The satisfaction of working with patients was so great, that the challenges of using, and the repetition caused by, the supporting technology did not even phase them.
Outcome
The technology to support the ideal workflows was identified for prioritization.
A range of technological solutions were initially evaluated and narrowed down to two key options for the final workshop. Each technology was then mapped out against the ideal workflows in regards to cost, time, and effort.
The team was able to make a decision based on this analysis and put forward a recommendation for the service-enabling technology that would result in improving the experience for the patient supporting staff, ultimately giving them the opportunity to help even more patients and touch even more lives.