UX Case Study | Public Hospitals in Portugal
Design and development of concepts for a non-digital solution.
During the first week at Ironhack I was grouped with Marco Silveria, Priscilla Alves and Mirkka Pulkkinen to tackle the pain points of the public health care system in Portugal through non-digital concepts and design of a solution.

Contextualization
At the moment, the public health care system in Portugal cannot keep up with the demand causing the emergency hospital services to be extremely overcrowded. The waiting time for less urgent patients can be over 4 hours at times.
Patients can also use a health care helpline called Saúde 24 for health consultations and advisory, booking appointments with family doctor, amongst other features.
Qualitative & Quantitative Research
In order to gather important information and draw conclusions on the users’ pain points, the team focused on interviewing a targeted group of people and created a survey.
Research Goals:
- Understand how patients use the public health care;
- Understand what are the pain points of the public health care system;
- Understand the expectations patients have when using the public health care.
Interviews:
In total, we interviewed 10 people ranging from 25 to 80 years old and the outcome was:
- The emergency service at public hospitals for less urgent patients is slow;
- Patients are satisfied with the diagnosis and treatment by nurses and doctors;
- People do not fully understand Saúde 24 and what it can be used for.
Survey:
Using the Lean Survey Canvas, we structured the survey and decided to focus on gathering information on the knowledge and awareness of society about Saúde 24. We ended up with 61 responses, and the findings were:
- 21,3% have not heard about Saúde 24;
- 37,5% have never used Saúde 24 and 52,1% rarely use it;
- 73,3% of the people that actually use the helpline, use it to ask for help with any health issue they might have.
Desk Research:
The Universidade Nova de Lisboa released a report on the public emergency services in Portugal and from a variety of very interesting facts, this one stood out:
- 50,8% of the emergency service users are non-urgent patients.
Research Conclusions
Using an Affinity Diagram, we grouped the data gathered and pin-pointed the patterns.

From the Affinity Map, we decided on the pain points to focus on in this project and what features (feelings, circumstances, etc) our persona should have.
Empathy Map was the tool used to create our persona, Marta, a single mom of 2 who believes that in-person doctor appointments is the only way for a good diagnosis and treatment and so her journey when going to the hospital with a non-urgent health issue (green bracelet) is something like this…

How Might We
In order to define how we could help Marta and other patients in this situation we came up with the following:

Ideation & Concept Testing
Round Robin was our tool of choice for this phase of the project because it is a fun and effective way to brainstorm ideas.

It was at this point that the three concepts were “born”. All concepts would be for patients with mild health issues, for any more problematic/urgent cases, these concepts would not work. Such concepts were tested with 9 people and out of the three, this one won:
- The patient calls the health helpline;
- A nurse does the first diagnosis and health counseling;
- If needed, the nurse can redirect the call to the doctor on call duty;
- In case medication in needed, the prescription is sent directly the closest pharmacy to the patient and is delivered to his home (includes a delivery fee).
Conclusion
These were the main reasons why people favored the concept above mentioned:
- Patient would not have to leave the comfort of his home;
- People would not mind paying the delivery fee for the delivery of the medication as home delivery services are very common and it feels familiar;
And these were our conclusions:
- Saúde 24 is not common knowledge within the Portuguese population as it should be;
- Everyone should be educated on the services that Saúde 24 offers;
- An effectively working health helpline would improve admission avoidance and therefore decrease the long waiting times at the hospital.
