Patient Service Design

Healthcare's issues are not primarily digital. While digital tools and UX may help some aspects of care, the majority of patient experience touchpoints will remain manual for the foreseeable future. As regional communications manager and content designer, I regularly advocated for real-world patient experience at every step of seeking, receiving, and paying for care.Recognizing this, Providence's VP of Consumer Communications asked me to develop a full-circle patient journey map—including both digital and and in-person interactions. The service design plan I developed below was used to help guide Providence's 5-year strategic planning.

CLIENT: PROVIDENCE HEALTH & SERVICES
Third-largest health system in U.S.

SPONSORS: System Vice President, Clinical & Consumer Communications; Divisional Chief Communications Officer

Defining scope

To begin, I built a proprietary patient journey map of typical stages & touchpoints in the course of receiving care.

This helps healthcare decisionmakers visualize the full patient journey, beyond the typical metrics & financial measures that drive healthcare planning.

Inviting Empathy

Drawing from patient survey responses & service recovery cases, I plotted pain points across each step of the patient journey.

Relatable poin points help leaders see both opportunities for improvement and the potential competitive edge gained by supporting patients overcome typical industry barriers.

Based on existing org structure/silos, I suggested a bucketing of UX work to develop content streams for patients across the healthcare journey

Grouping the work

The analysis yielded key observations to consider in supporting change

Roles & Work

Putting the patient at the center, and drawing on cross-disciplinary workgroup input, I then:

Identified necessary stakeholder groups within the organization to help execute a patient content strategy, to align with identified workstreams
Ennumerated actionable solutions to enhance patient experience
Proposed new roles, experience and tools required to guide the work of boosting navigability and support for patients at every stage of their journey

Acknowledging that patient experience gaps are also fueled by structural tool and team divisions, I outlined a parallel approach the new team could take to prioritize supporting frontline staff.

Internal teams and staff pain points were identified, together with a set of solutions to support frontline staff in order to meet patients' needs.

Integration & Reorg

Part of the request was to identify other departmental roles that might be repurposed to staff the new focus on full-journey patient experience.

I provided a number of alternative structure options, with varying numbers of new FTE required.

To help sell the plan to other leaders, I also showed how these focused roles would directly support organizational priorities being developed in the newest 5-year plan.

Results

This new take on full-experience content design for healthcare was eagerly socialized and discussed at the highest level of two of the 5 divisions reporting up to the Chief Executive.

Future direction planning, including assessment of the ideas and structure presented here, is ongoing.

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