Insights about patient's experience while using the healthcare system.
Before creating a new business vertical, the company needed to identify key opportunities for value delivery, focused on patients.
We applied Service Design as foundational methodology, mentored by Irene Issa El Khoury as external consultant and completely executed by my colleague Mónica Gómez and I.
The challenge.
This was the second time the company approached the challenge to create a new service with the aim of making healthcare more affordable to patients. The first time the focus was on developing digital tools for third-party organizations that provided the service, but market reality was different than expected. Now the company wanted to directly offer the service. It was key to understand the current patient's journey through the healthcare system and find where to intersect their experience with our service.
Interview transcripts and insights extraction, organized in a multiuser Journey Map.
The process.
We applied the three first Design Thinking's steps, fostering cross-department participation:
1. Understand or empathize: analyze existing documentation from previous projects and did some service safaris at hospitals and clinics. Together with colleagues from business operations, marketing, sales and software development, we planed and ran a Hypothesis workshop to identify key aspects we wanted to understand better and map out our biases as well.
2. Observe: create interview guides, recruit users for interview and execute exploratory interviews by phone, since patients were reluctant to do face to face interviews. Building trust was very important during the interviews because sharing health information is a highly sensitive topic.
3. Synthesize: we wanted to get to core of the experience and transmit insights as raw as possible, so we literally transcript every interview and organize insights by similar behaviors, then presented to the whole work group and ran an Insights workshop, so everyone could listen users first hand. We shared an executive summary version to other stakeholders and company wide as well.
Archetypes of behavior and what is valuable for them.
The outcome.
We were able to identify five main patient's behaviors (typologies in design lingo) and propose a value delivery promise for each one of them. We also stablished a clear vision of their journey and the key moments where our service could come in play and be more successfully acquired by users. As a bonus finding, the whole team where able to spot huge opportunity gaps that our competitors hadn't exploded yet.
I believe the most important outcome was to achieve a holistic understanding of the user's reality and to build empathy within the whole team. As a prove of it, the marketing team developed the brand message entirely based on the emotional findings we uncovered, changing their focus from a competitors view to a user-centric view. It was gold to me.
The end.
