3 Opportunities and Challenges for UXRs Working in the Healthcare Industry
For UXRs out there who may be looking for a new position in the job market, you may consider applying for positions in Patient Experience, Customer Experience, or Care Experience Teams within the healthcare industry, more specifically, in a healthcare provider organization.
Having attended this year’s Press Ganey Human Experience Conference, and drawing from my own experience working in healthcare for over a year, here are 3 main opportunities for UXRs looking to transition your skills into a new industry and 3 potential challenges you may encounter.
* For better readability, throughout this article I will use “customer experience” as a general term to include patient experience. In healthcare organizations, these two terms may have distinct meanings or serve different functions.
Opportunities
· Apply the same research skills and best practices to understand customers’ needs and pain points:
As a UXR, our core responsibilities do not change much when working in the healthcare industry. Fundamentally, our job is to understand the customers’ needs and pain points in receiving healthcare to improve customer’s experience and meet the business goals. What may be different is the type of research project you will be working on. As healthcare is a service-based industry, you may be less likely to launch usability studies to test a product or a website (so far at Legacy Health I only conducted one usability study). Instead, you may be doing more foundational research to help create strategic roadmaps (will elaborate more on this later). Or you may be tasked to create customer journey maps and survey patients to help optimize their care journey. Speakers at this year’s conference also highlighted how research, customer segments, persona, and journey maps contribute to stakeholder engagement. Regardless of the project type, a UXR’s fundamental task remains the same: to identify the problem statement and apply the most suitable method(s) to collect data and provide insights.
· Engage in macro-level research projects and formulate strategic recommendations:
I was listening to Lenny’s podcast and in one of his episodes, he interviewed Judd Antin (consultant, ex-Meta, ex-Airbnb). Based on the project scope and scale, Judd categorized research projects into three types: macro, middle-range, and micro (08:53 in the podcast where Judd explains the three research types). His analysis also reminded me of my past conversation with Amit Saxena (UXR at Amazon). I asked him what it takes to move up the career ladder to become a staff UXR. Similarly, he also mentioned that staff-level UXRs may have to start working on more ambiguous research questions. The nature of macro research projects tends to be less structured and more abstract.
Working in a healthcare system allows you to work on macro-level research projects. One of the goals of this type of project is to help create strategic roadmaps or recommendations. The word “strategy” comes up in almost half of the session title at this year’s HX Conference. At Legacy Health’s CX team, we also discuss how to formulate strategies through research projects. If you’ve been working mostly on micro or middle-range projects, this might be a good opportunity for you to expand and work on larger-scale, macro projects.
· Continue to be an advocate for Human Experience a.k.a. UX:
Recently I keep seeing UXRs asking this similar question in online forums or on LinkedIn, “what does the future hold for UX?” The constant news headline announcing another company is laying off employees and seeing UXRs being impacted does make people wonder whether UX is going away in the near future. Personally, I believe as long as humans have not transformed into robots, there is always a need to understand how humans interact with technology. In the future, the core need of UXR’s work may stay intact but our job responsibilities or titles may start shifting. For example, before UX became the new shiny toy in the industry, there was “human factors”. Human factor engineering may be less well known for some, but it is still a highly relevant field, mostly in certain specific industries (nuclear power plant, aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.,). Even in the past 2 decades, after UX started blooming in tech, other industries, such as banking, fintech, gaming, consulting firms, and even healthcare, jumped on the wagon and began to hire UXRs. The underlying responsibility of these job titles is to evaluate “human experience”. This is also the theme of this year’s Press Ganey Conference — human experience. As there are so many different stakeholders involved in the healthcare journey — employees, patients, customers — “human experience” seems to be the suitable term to capture all types of experiences within healthcare. Through attending this year’s conference, it is obvious that people in the healthcare industry are embracing and acknowledging the importance of human experience. Better employee experience leads to more positive patient experience, causing a healthier healthcare system. People with different job titles all have certain degrees of work related to either patient, customer, or employee experience (this could also be a challenge for UXRs, more explanation in the challenges section). However, what might still be new to this industry is the job position “UXR” as not everyone is fully aware of what this job title entails. If you get the chance to work in healthcare, this is your opportunity to showcase your skills and value as a UXR and continue to be an advocate for the “human experience”.
Challenges
· Acquire new domain knowledge in the healthcare industry:
If someone asks you to explain how the healthcare system in the U.S. works in 5 minutes, what would be your response? The U.S. has a relatively complex healthcare system compared to other countries. On the provider side, there are many different care sites: PCP, urgent care, ED, hospital, virtual care, etc., You also have to go through the referral process to see certain specialists. On the payer side, there are many different insurance types (Commercial: PPO, HMO, EPO; Government: Medicare and Medicaid; and others) and networks (in-network and out-network). This is just the tip of the iceberg trying to explain the healthcare system to a layperson. If you’re coming into this field without a healthcare background, it would be an uphill battle the first few months trying to understand how the system works. Personally, I think the learning curve is steeper in healthcare than in some other industries. As long as you have the will to continue to learn new knowledge, it would be a rewarding process when you feel like you almost cracked the case and have a “better” understanding of how the healthcare system in the U.S. operates.
· Collaborate with a different set of stakeholders; define your team’s scope in CX:
Working with stakeholders would always be a much-needed skill, despite which industry you’re working in or your position. One thing that makes it unique, especially for people who are used to working in tech or product-based industry, is that the stakeholders you will collaborate with are less likely to be your typical PM, UX designers, and engineers. Instead, you are more likely to work closely with clinic managers, care program team, healthcare professionals (physicians, RN, APP, CSS), IT, or senior leaders working on the system level. The interesting part of working with these stakeholder groups is that CX is not an initiative centralized to only one team. Many stakeholders’ works are directly or indirectly related to CX or PX. For example, there may be a team focusing on improving in-patient’s experience and there would be another team emphasizing on ambulatory care experience. There are also member experience and employee experience that are other team’s responsibilities. As a UXR, it may be daunting to identify what is in scope of your team’s work when other teams are working toward the same goal but in silo. This difference is more prominent if you’re used to working in a working culture where you are the go-to person/team when it comes to improving user experience.
· Adjust to a different work pace and working in a service-based industry:
If you are used to working in a faster work pace environment where it is common to shorten your project timeline to meet the new deadline, then you might find it challenging to work in the healthcare industry where projects tend to move a bit slower. I’m making this statement solely based on my own working experience, and it might not stand true for every healthcare organization. However, in general, since healthcare is an industry that has a low tolerance for risk when it comes to patient safety, projects tend to move forward comparatively slower than the tech industry where it is common to do rapid testing and provide new product version updates. This also leads to another challenge for UXRs who may be more used to working in a product-based industry. As healthcare is a service-based industry, it might be challenging at first to envision how to apply design thinking and design principles to your daily work. Instead of having UX designers create mock-ups or lo-fi, hi-fi prototypes using Figma, in healthcare there are innovation teams that apply similar design cycles in creating service designs for patients. The challenge would be how to transfer your design thinking skills into another industry where the terminologies may be different, but the fundamental concept remains the same. For instance, you can still apply the double-diamond framework to the innovation process in healthcare. Applying design thinking to a service-based industry may initially seem unfamiliar, but finding parallels and applying similar concepts to a new industry can be a fulfilling learning experience.
These 3 opportunities and challenges are drawn from my personal working experience and observations at this year’s Press Ganey Human Experience Conference. I hope this article provides valuable insights and encourages you to consider whether working in healthcare as a UXR aligns with your skills and aspirations.
Last of all, I want to share one highlight from this trip: an Uber/Lyft driver took a creative approach to create an unforgivable experience for his customers.
