Improving Dentist Visits
A Design Thinking Project for Adeslas Dental
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The other day, a lifelong friend of mine mentioned that she hadn’t been to the dentist in over four years: “I’m not going back there until I can’t feel my mouth; I hate it with all my soul.” For her, and many others, going to the dentist is worst than watching all the Conjuring movies in one afternoon 👹. Since we were kids, we’ve all heard those infernal machines grinding our teeth, how mouth openers left our pride on the floor, and how our parents had to dig deep into their wallets to provide us with a perfect smile.
48.3% of Spanish teenagers suffer from odontophobia, while 40.3% of adults do.
The reality is that even if you’re not afraid, no one likes going to the dentist. This makes me wonder, why hasn’t something so necessary and basic found a way to please users, even just a little? Why is odontophobia so common, but no solution is in place?
The Challenge: Reinventing the Dentist Visit
This was the situation my team and I found ourselves in one quiet Monday in November: we had twelve days to understand the roots of this problem and come up with a solution that could improve the patient experience. For this project, we used the Design Thinking methodology, riding the ups and downs of its double diamond.
1. DISCOVER
We rolled up our sleeves and started with a DESK RESEARCH to answer all the questions we had and to identify all the issues where information was lacking. From this, we were able to extract these four key findings 💡:
- Most cases of odontophobia stem from past traumas or fears of possible pain they might experience.
- A portion of the population doesn’t visit the dentist as often as they should, going only in emergencies that could have been avoided, resulting in more pain and higher costs.
- Most Spaniards prefer going to a private clinic rather than a franchise or insurer, as it gives them more confidence.
- In Spain, with our free healthcare system, we’re not used to paying such high amounts for dental treatments, making this a significant pain point for users.
Meanwhile, several team members had appointments with their dentists (what a coincidence, right?…😏). Thanks to this SAFARI, we identified several patterns: all the waiting rooms were very cold, the lighting wasn’t natural, and most didn’t have any kind of distraction in the waiting area.
With these conclusions, we conducted SURVEYS to get a firsthand understanding of the user. In these, 100 people participated, giving us some very clarifying responses:
- The reason for choosing their clinic was by recommendation (27%) and by habit/trust (21%).
- What they value most is the care provided (33%) and knowing the dentist (26%).
- The biggest discomfort caused by going to the dentist is the pain (30%) and the cost (23%).
It was time for the interviews 🗣️
We had the pleasure of speaking with five dentists: Rosalía Muñoz, Gema Maeso, Geraldine Gómez, Héctor Vallejos, and Ramiro Pedretti. Their words were key to the research, as we could draw the following conclusions in the form of verbatims:
“First, communication, but effective. Listen to the patient, understand their needs, and make sure they feel heard.”
“What sets us apart is the personal treatment. The first visit should go beyond marketing, creating comfort by welcoming the patient with kindness, using their name, and most importantly, listening.”
“Franchises are not close; they just want to sell.”
At the same time, we conducted four interviews with four pacients: Ana García, José Antonio Gómez, Ana María Rivera, and Adrián Álvarez. All of them were of different ages, cities, and backgrounds. With them, we could get closer to the users and ask them all those unresolved questions.
“I don’t understand anything they say, but I still trust them because they’re the professional.”
“What I value most is the staff. They have to be kind, professional, so I can trust them.”
“I always go to the same one because they already know I get a bit anxious about going to the dentist and they understand.”
2. DEFINE
With all this vast amount of information, we could already start to get an idea of what our USER PERSONA would be like. Since it wasn’t possible to create just one profile due to the wide variety of characteristics we identified, we decided to divide them into two:
👩🏽 Patricia, annual patient: She is aware of oral health but doesn’t enjoy dentist visits.
🎯 Goals: To find a trustworthy dentist, so she can age with perfect teeth.
🤔 What does she need? More transparency and value in the consultation experience.
👩🏽 Alba, dentist: Very hardworking and empathetic, but doesn’t have enough time to give her patients more personal attention.
🎯 Goals: To satisfy her clients, gain more patience or calm, and improve people’s oral health.
🤔 What does she need? More time and more knowledge about her patients.
With these two techniques, the team could put themselves in the shoes of the archetypes and remember for whom we were designing, setting our egos aside. The creation of a USER JOURNEY motivated us to understand the main pain points of each of our users throughout the entire process. With all this information synthesized and understood by all the team members, we finally reached these two INSIGHTS 🙏🏽:
All roads lead to Rome, and in this case, all the research pointed to the same conclusion. For this reason, the team felt the need to reformulate the challenge initially posed:
How could we improve and encourage communication between patient and dentist to promote patient comfort?
3. DEVELOPMENT
Finally, we reached the moment of generating ideas, in my opinion, the most exciting part 🤗. Since we had already discovered the insights and redefined the challenge, the team had a clearer focus.
The process began with a brainwriting session, which generated a large number of ideas that we gradually discussed in the group to see if they matched our goal. At this point, it was crucial to unleash our creativity but to set aside all biases, always focusing on the new challenge, the insights, and the needs of Patricia and Alba. We conducted several rounds of selection, reformulated several ideas, and merged those that could complement each other… It looked like a jungle! 🐒
After hours of debate, voting, and much thought, the group managed to decide on the idea that, in our opinion, was the most suitable for this project:
More ideation 🧠
As you can see, it still lacked many details, so we decided to conduct a BENCHMARK to observe what other companies had done to improve this problem. The information we found was very limited, so many questions began to arise… What kind of technology would it be? What type of clinic would use it? Would it be done in the office or could it be done from home? How does it address our two insights?…
4. SOLUTION 💡: A New Functionality for the Adeslas App
Now you’re probably wondering… A new functionality?… For Adeslas?… Why Adeslas?! 🤯 I know it’s not what you might have imagined at first, but there’s an explanation.
The team concluded, thanks to one of the findings in our research, that franchises and insurers are the clinics with the least communication, empathy and trust with their clients. Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to focus on them. We chose the insurer Adeslas because, in addition to being the leading health insurance brand, it has a large number of dental clinics with nearly 1,600 dentists across Spain.
Now, this new functionality is aimed at new users or those who are about to change dentists. It would start from the moment the appointment is booked online through the app and includes the following features:
- 🔍 Clinic selection by location, service, or dentist.
- 📋 Professional information about each dentist, with ratings and reviews from other clients. This way, we want users to know more about their future dentist and their way of working.
- 🧘🏽♀️ Option to add preferences: This is the key feature. It’s a questionnaire where different questions are asked about their fears, perceptions of dentists, past experiences, and their preferences in the consultation (whether they want to chat, listen to music, what type of music, etc.).
- 👂🏽 Option to be contacted by a professional before the appointment. This way, the patient could communicate their fears and doubts to feel more comfortable and relieved.
With this functionality, we aim for the dentist to know in advance the needs of their patients, to provide them with a more personalized experience and build trust with them. Additionally, it would reduce the consultation time, as the professional would go straight to the priorities and needs of their patients.
Market differentiation 🛒
Although some of the previously explained features already exist, by doing a small benchmarking with the main apps of dental companies and insurers, we realized that none of them include all these features.
Prototype 📱
It is designed to be a functionality that aligns with the existing Adeslas app, designed in an intuitive and simple way to avoid complicating the process for users. In the following images, you can see the flow a user would follow from the moment they book the appointment until they complete the questionnaire:
In this video, you can see how this prototype´s workflow:
PROPOSAL OF VALUE
We know that with this project, the experience of going to the dentist would improve, as it focuses on making each user’s consultation more personalized, thus acquiring a value with which users would feel more satisfied when paying. This would increase the number of patient visits, leading to greater prevention and awareness of oral health. We would stop the vicious circle of not going to the dentist regularly, avoiding more painful and costly future complications. In addition to all this, Adeslas would encourage the enrollment of new clients while improving the satisfaction of existing ones.
5. CONCLUSIONS ✨
The most exciting part of this project has been learning more about this problem, which I personally didn’t know was so difficult and widespread across the world. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed this methodology because, at first, I thought we had to come up with an answer that would change the whole world. By the end, I understood that even a small change can be very be significant for the user if it improves their experience.
Thanks for reading! See you soon👋🏼
