Week 1. Research, brainstorm, framing.

This week was a project kick-off. We were introduced to NYU Langone Health representatives and learned the problem statement which is: How might NYULH improve its patient experience to be more inclusive, supportive and positive for people who are transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer.

We learned about background, challenges and opportunities and had a chance to talk to a person who has experienced these challenges in the past.

This topic is very new for me, I don’t have much experience working with a problem like this in the past. I don’t know any transgender people personally, so I had to learn a lot over this past week. My team agreed that we would conduct some research over the past week and would meet on Monday to discuss our findings, what to next and how to organize our research.

Since this is more of User Experience project, we decided to follow the double diamond scheme as well as human-centered design.

In the first phase we have to empathize with the users and it is a very important step in the process, we need to understand who our users are, what their feelings, challenges are. As well as think and find what already exists and learn from positive experience. We need to make sure we can put ourselves in the shoes of the user.

At this time we are diverging, getting inspired. We are brainstorming, looking at all possible options, collecting data from secondary research, trying to understand the gaps.

I have started my research from reading research articles that we were provided with, I found “Barriers to healthcare for transgender individuals” (2016) by Safer, J. D., Coleman, E. et al. very helpful for understanding what barriers exist:

“A US sample of 1093 transgender persons demonstrated a high prevalence of clinical depression (44.1%), anxiety (33.2%), and somatization (27.5%)”

“The biggest barrier both to safe hormonal therapy and to appropriate general medical care for transgender patients is the lack of access to care. Despite both guidelines and data supporting the current transgender medicine treatment paradigm, transgender patients report that lack of providers with expertise in transgender medicine represents the single largest component inhibiting access. Transgender treatment is not taught in conventional medical curricula and too few physicians have the requisite knowledge and comfort level.”

“Other reported barriers include: financial barriers (lack of insurance, lack of income), discrimination, lack of cultural competence by health care providers, health systems barriers (inappropriate electronic records, forms, lab references, clinic facilities) and socioeconomic barriers (transportation, housing, mental health).”

From “Global health burden and needs of transgender populations: a review.” by Reisner, S. L., Poteat, at al. :“A comprehensive public health approach to address the health of transgender people requires ensuring access to gender affirmation, evidence-based healthcare delivery systems, and effective partnerships with local transgender communities.”

Also, Eva shared a handbook for healthcare professionals that already exists:

It is important to see what was already created and learn from that, too.

Here are some statistics by Williams Institute UCLA:

• Only 56% of transgender people overall had a transgender-related health care provider. Fewer nonbinary people accessed transgender-related health care.
• Of transgender participants, 82% said they would like to access an LGBT or transgender-specific clinic or provider. But 64% of transgender people had not been to an LGBT or transgender-specific clinic or provider over the five-year period prior to the interview.

One of ideas that I came up with during my research is that maybe we could look at the problem from a health providers’ angle. Maybe we could focus on educating healthcare providers and people working in the industry, so that they are aware of the problem and barriers and are able to provide professional service to transgender people.

In our meeting on Monday we shared what research findings we had, started putting them on a Mural board and organizing them by groups (we are still adding more):

Then, we came up with an idea of creating a survey to get more insights from target audience. So we started working on it. First we compiled questions in a WordDoc and then started transferring them to a Google Form:

By the end of the week we would like to be done with creating a survey and would like to start sending out to LGBTQ+ communities in NY area (we will start by sending to NYU community first).

We have added tasks that we are working on to the Trello board to make sure everyone in the team knows what to do and that we are on the same page and are organized:

So far, we have been productive and on track. Team meetings do help to share the knowledge, organize thoughts, think of next steps, so I hope we will continue having them.

This week, I would like to watch some videos of transgender people talking about their healthcare challenges, listening to podcasts on this topic and read some Reddit threads to get some anecdotal examples.

Hopefully, we will get some insights from survey respondents and it will help us narrow down and frame the problem.