Redefining your Clinic Experience

When was the last time you fell sick? How was the experience visiting the doctor? What were you thinking of when you were at the clinic?

How can we improve the experience?

These 2 weeks we looked into the service design transformation for Raffles Medical Group (RMG).

A quick brainstorm within the team resulted in our preliminary Problem Statement and Opportunities.

Problem Statement: Long wait times and large crowds at the clinics and healthcare institutes can lead to unnecessary spreading of contagious diseases.

The Opportunities: Reducing / managing wait times and crowd control will help patients get the medical attention more effectively without worrying about spreading of infectious diseases.

The Methodology

For this service redesign, we used the Double Diamond for Design Process. It was an iterative design cycle with 4 defined stages, Research, Insights, Ideation and Prototypes.

Research

To understand how consumers really think and feel, it is vital to go beyond words. — Katja Bressette

Comparative Analysis

There were 8 major integrated healthcare institutions in Singapore. 6 public 2 private. RMG being the largest.

We picked the top 3 competitors (Parkway/Shenton, Singhealth, National Healthcare Group [NHG]) which offered the same suite of services RMG had.

A quick look into RMG’s website and mobile app uncovered several findings. Both platforms were largely information based and there was no real-time appointment system.

The miHealth app which allowed appointment making for all public polyclinics had a long flow which required the patient to provide a lot of information. However, if a patient were to use the NHG website instead, they would be presented with a simpler flow.

Contextual Inquiry & Interviews

We visited various clinics and spoke to various individuals (including patients and staff) at RMG and its competitors (Singhealth, National Healthcare Group and Parkway Health).

The key takeaways from these sessions were:

• Risk of getting more ill while waiting at crowded clinics
• Unknown wait times at clinics
• Shortage of manpower at clinics

Insights

Grouping all the findings from the contextual inquiries and interviews together, we were able to uncover relationships in the feedback received. Putting together this set of findings together with the results of the analysis of competitors’ websites and mobile applications, we also came up with a list of design considerations for our followup.

With these findings, we made some adjustments to The Opportunities that we had drafted earlier.

Revised Opportunities

• Ability to make appointment, receive notifications nearer to turn, manage wait times to reduce congregation of patients, to prevent outbreak of contagious / infectious diseases
• Reduce manual processes, enable staff to better serve patients to improve the experience

Personas

Who would be using this system?

We also designed 3 personas, Johnny Walker, James Cook and Mary Chia, who would represent the key people visiting RMG family clinics. The features which we developed would also be catered to the personas’ needs.

Ideation

We came up with a laundry list of features which would help improve clinic experience. Some of these features include front-end appointment system (which would be used by both patients and staff), to digitising medical records and automating medicine dispensing.

Features Prioritisation

While our entire solution was aimed to improved the entire clinic experience end to end for both patients and staff, we were unable to prototype every feature due to time constrains. Thus, we had to prioritise the features according to the personas’ needs and cost of implementation. The features which were ranked highly in terms of needs, and low in cost were selected for the 1st phase of prototyping.

Service Blueprint

How would the personas interact with the system?

With the list of features in hand, we plotted the end-to-end service blueprint. This blueprint documented the flow and interaction points between patients, the system and clinic staff.

Prototyping

Based on the features which were prioritized, we started working on possible designs and decided on the platforms which we would develop them.

Mobile app: iOS (developed on Axure)

Kiosk: simulated using iPad (developed on Sketch, animated on inVision)

Digital display: displayed on MacBook (animated on Principle)

Each platform was tested over 3 Sprints, starting with paper prototype to mid-fi digitised prototype before it was translated to the final hi-fi final prototype.

Mobile Application

Most participants were able to complete the tests for the mobile application. However, there were feedback that the some of our screens were too wordy for a sick person to go through. We also noticed many participants were tapping on the clinic locator (which was not fully prototyped). This confirmed that clinic locator was important to a specific group of people and this could be prototyped and tested in more details in subsequent phases.

While testing the notifications, we received mixed feedback on the frequency of notifications received. While all participants welcomed the notifications, some found it excessive. This could be overcome by allowing patients to customize the notifications in the mobile app.

Clinic Kiosk

Participants were mostly confused by the wording on the options available on the landing page. This was quickly resolved with a change in words during the 2nd sprint. Participants were also puzzled why check-in was required when an appointment had been made. This was needed to confirm the patient had arrived at the clinic and was ready to see the doc. Including geofencing feature in the future could assist to check-in the patient when he is within close proximity of the clinic and eliminate the need to check-in.

Clinic Display

The clinic display was required to clearly show wait times at various points in the clinic. For the initial iterations, we included animations to make waiting more interesting, however, this backfired as all participants could not understand these animations and thought they were unnecessary. Participants also commented that there were too much information on the screen for an unwell person to digest.

Final Prototype

What does the final prototype look like? How does it work?

After working on all the feedback received, the final prototype was made. The final prototype can be viewed in the movie below.

Conclusion

Our solution was developed with RMG’s core values in mind.

In the short span of 2 weeks, we were only able to develop on some of the quick wins. There was a lot of other work needed to be done to the entire end-to-end clinic journey to fully reap the benefits.

• Leveraging on simple technology will bring quick wins which will create value for RMG’s patients and staff
• Digitisation to improve efficiency in handling patients & reduce manual administrative work
• Automation will also ensure standard operating procedures are followed, with reduction in manual intervention which was error prone
• Staff would have more time to interact with patients to improve their clinic experience