Understanding the patient for a healthy patient experience
Challenge
The institution already had a prestige earned by its trajectory, but an intentional design of the service was needed to control some variables in order to ensure the satisfaction and recommendation not only of patients and their families, but also of health professionals.
Result
It was the first patient experience program in the region. The work identified improvements in non-care aspects of the service, helped increase bed occupancy (as well as NPS) and consolidated a patient-centered culture, using the emotional design of the Performance Criteria for all areas and levels involved.
Phase 1
Team building and training
With a strong endorsement from the management, a multidisciplinary team was formed, made up of people in key roles (care and non-care) within the patient's pathway. As none of them knew the methodology to be used, they had to be trained initially.
PHASE 2
Teamwork
The work was done in face-to-face mode, scheduling the meetings to make them compatible with the very demanding activities of the team members. Agile Service Design techniques were applied, particularly for the health sector, based on the long experience we have working in this industry.
phase 3
Discovery
As the design work progressed with the team, a series of actions were deployed to understand the experiences from the perspective of the patients themselves and their circumstances. The nature of the work was qualitative, and included focus groups and interviews with different groups: discharged patients, hospitalized patients and sanatorium staff (doctors, nurses and administrative staff). Ethnographic observations were also made along the patient's pathway.
All field work was done respecting the specific protocols of research in the health field, preserving the patient in every way.
Phase 4
Research
It is customary in our projects to resort to methodological triangulation. In this case we used a quantitative approach to give numerical entity to the findings. Hundreds of surveys were conducted, either self-administered by patients or administered by telephone by surveyors.
Phase 5
Consolidation
The input generated by the work (insights and measurements) was an additional input for the project team. Valuable patient-generated input was incorporated, complementing and enriching what the team of specialists had designed.
Phase 6
Clean Up
The generated material is refined to arrive at the final deliverables of the project.
Final deliverables
Sanatorio Finochietto received:
- A complete report with the results of the qualitative stage.
- A report with the results of the quantitative stage, including tables and graphs with the measurements of the different experience variables.
- The "cast" of 5 Design Personas on which to focus changes and training.
- Performance Criteria for use in inductions and training.
- A report of Conclusions and Recommendations.
Project duration
5 months net
Team
Sr. Consultant
Qualitative research specialist
Quantitative research specialist
Experience designer
Analyst
