Aug 21, 2020
Insights On User Data & Care Delivery In The Public Healthcare Sector
Public Healthcare Services is established to provide affordable healthcare to all strata of society.
I conducted primary and secondary research to understand the public healthcare sector in India and the underlying problems that plague the stakeholders functioning in the current system.
Ecosystem sensing involved looking at the various facilities available across public healthcare in India, services provided at the facilities, stakeholders who are part of the system to ensure service delivery, and the responsibilities of each facility in the public healthcare system.
Talking to patients as well as service providers at government facilities helped validate the pain points in the user journey that emerged in the secondary research.
User data and care delivery were the emergent concerns from the research.
INSIGHTS ON USER DATA
- Patients have no control over the personal data they provide to the hospital and don’t know who’s accessed it and why.
2. The process of complaint redressal is tedious and with no concrete data, it’s difficult to hold the service provider accountable for an error.
3. Paper is widely used in hospitals which increases the chances of the paper getting lost or ruined before it is digitized.
4. Availing government schemes or appealing for insurance claim payout takes a lot of time and to avail them, the user has to spend a lot of time and effort in following regulations to prove their user journey.
5. There is no central database to check if the patient has consented to donate organs after their demise so the service providers have to take consent from the caregivers of the patient.
INSIGHTS ON CARE DELIVERY
- Only working on the technology to improve accountability wouldn’t be enough if the system itself is flawed from the service providers' and the hospital management's perspectives.
2. The experience of care needs to be conveyed to the users much more effectively because trust in service providers is an important cornerstone in developing the user’s mental model of the hospital.
3. We need to improve the care delivery system between patients and service providers to foster empathy so we don’t just look at the physical or the mental wellbeing but also the social wellbeing of all the stakeholders in the system.
