An Exercise In Empathy - Going Undercover To Discover What It’s Like To Be The User

Challenge

In 2000, IDEO began work with SSM DePaul Health Center in Saint Louis. They started with what is perhaps the most demanding of all hospital environments: the emergency room.

Understand

Kristian Simsarian, one of the core team members, set out to capture the patient experience. Feigning a foot injury, Kristian placed himself into the shoes of the average emergency room patient. He saw firsthand how disorienting the check-in process could be. He experienced the frustration of being asked to wait, without ever being told what he was waiting for or why. He endured the anxiety of being wheeled by an unidentified staffer down an anonymous corridor through a pair of intimidating double doors and into the glare and the din of the emergency room.

Going Deep

With a video camera tucked discreetly beneath his hospital gown, Kristian captured a patient’s experience in a raw, unedited format. When Kristian returned from his undercover mission, the team reviewed the video, and one of the first things they noticed, was the sheer amount of time he spent lying on his back, waiting on a rolling cot, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles. The tiles became a symbol of the overall ambiance: a mix of boredom and anxiety from feeling lost, uninformed, and out of control.

Result

When they showed the video to doctors and hospital executives it was striking. The hospital staff had been thinking about the “patient journey” in terms of insurance verification, medical prioritization, and bed allocation. But the patient experienced it as lying on their back staring at the ceiling tiles, with no information about what to expect. They had completely missed the human side. This video and the insights it provided became the basis of a far-reaching program of “codesign” in which IDEO’s designers worked with DePaul’s hospital staff to explore hundreds of opportunities to improve the patient experience.

Original article: Empathy: Standing in the Shoes (or Lying on the Gurneys) of Others