A design-driven collaborative journey to informed vision and roadmap
athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and financial results.
The level of an organization’s design maturity is determined by the degree to which it adopts design-driven practices, which in turn influences the quality of its offerings and business benefits.
According to “The New Design Frontier” report published by InVision, the levels of design maturity range from ‘Producers’ to ‘Visionaries’.
On a broader perspective, the organizational design maturity depends on these two factors:
How well is design integrated into the core processes of the organization (From agile development to strategy building)?
How involved are your stakeholders in design-related practices and processes?
As members of the athenahealth designer community, we feel responsible to identify and utilize opportunities for advancement in both areas. Recently, we had an opportunity to do just that.
In healthcare revenue cycle management, ‘posting’ is a crucial component that involves logging all the received payments into the practice’s system thereby updating their accounts receivable (AR). Last year, customer feedback suggested an opportunity to further increase the efficiency and timeliness in posting, specific to collecting patient prepayments for services. While athenahealth already offered a suite of capabilities to address practice needs on prepayments, feedback and usage stats led us to conclude that those were underutilized. Further research showed the cause to be a disjointed user experience involving numerous manual touch points.So, we decided to reimagine the entire experience of prepayments.
The idea of a big-scale revamp was overwhelming and daunting for our scrum team, which consists of a product manager, a designer, and three engineers. Since the current system encompassed functions owned by many different teams, we lacked the big picture as well. But things started to turn around when we brought more players to the game, including product operations, product analytics, customer success, product managers, and designers from other teams.
The problem space exploration
Our first step was to leverage internal resources for a better understanding of the current state. It involved collaboration with partners from various teams.
This diverse partnership helped ensure we left no stone unturned, laying a strong foundation for conducting client research and for building the minimum viable product (MVP). We initiated two parallel efforts to inform the vision and roadmap:
The north star vision and roadmap exercise
Partnering with experts from various teams brought immense value during the exploration phase. This inspired us to continue the partnership for the next phase — problem identification and ideation.
It was uncommon for these diverse teams from customer success, analytics, operations, research, and development to convene. We all came from different geographies, time zones, and working hours but we also were looking forward to the ways we could contribute together to a strong vision for this huge initiative. We took that on as a challenge!
Inspired by the lightning decision jam framework created by AJ & Smart, we designed an exercise so that all of us could participate remotely using MURAL, a digital visual collaboration tool. This framework combined all the best parts of a remote workshop: mindfulness of the time, ability to participate from one’s location, and eliminated discussions that are uncalled for and never-ending. We ran it during two separate sessions, each spanning 1.5 hours.
We built upon work we had previously completed and shared the experience map, the results of a standard feature perception survey, and the alpha customer feedback with the participants a few days before the workshop.
Phase 1: The problem identification and prioritization workshop
After we shared the outcomes of the exploration phase with the participants, we also relied on the insights they could share based on their respective expertise. To allow all of us to work simultaneously, separate sections of one large MURAL were created for each participant to write down their problems. We gave everyone 10 minutes to complete this.
We then created an affinity map by grouping similar problems into clusters. This was the most chaotic part of the entire workshop with 16 members trying to form problem clusters by moving their problem stickies into a common area.
At the end of the workshop, those problem clusters were converted into ‘How might we’ challenges followed by a 10-minute session with all the participants voting for the top three challenges.
Phase 2: The ideation workshop
The next day, we asked participants to ideate and come up with possible solution approaches in their MURAL spaces for the top three challenges.
Once they finished, we grouped similar solution approaches and listed them under the respective challenges. In the end, we asked participants to rate the solution approaches based on the business impact and the required effort on a scale of 1 to 5.
Outcome: The future state experience map
The outcomes of the workshop are a set of meaningful challenges and solution approaches recommended and prioritized by experts and stakeholders.
This led us to derive a four faceted vision and multi-user experience flow depicting the future state we envision.
The shared vision and future state map informed the roadmap in a meaningful, actionable way and got all the stakeholders in alignment.
The lessons and next steps
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”-Henry Ford
‘Valuing everyone’ is one of the enterprise values of Athena. By valuing the knowledge of our experts and stakeholders, we
- Understood the big picture
- Identified the right problems to solve
- Realized our north star vision and strategy
- Developed a pragmatic roadmap
Discovery is a critical phase of the design process and product development, and there will certainly be opportunities for partnership with experts outside the scrum team.
While this journey re-emphasized the need for such a partnership in visioning, strategy and design processes, it also taught us a few lessons on how this can be done better.
Be mindful of the participants’ time
Highlight the takeaways of every exercise
Defining roles can make people more accountable and enthusiastic
Keep them posted on the progress
A small time spent on planning goes a long way — Remote collaboration is a challenge. A complete dry run really helps.
These lessons indicate a basic framework that can set the objectives and define the roles of participants will make the ‘Discovery’ phase more effective. We also believe it will encourage further participation from stakeholders outside the design team. That, in turn, will be a significant step towards elevating the organizational design maturity.
