Designing Experiences
My mentor and first division chief Charlie Safran had a quip about EHRs — they have become feature rich, and function poor.
Think about that for a moment.
In health care, we manage a great deal of complexity, across a range of different specialties and different needs of people. We need this, we need that. As a result, more and more is added, but nothing is ever taken away. The experience of using the EHR then becomes something of a jumbled mess, where you aren’t sure where to look, let alone click.
The current trends in design are focusing more around experiences, rather than features.
For a non-health care example, Marvel (a design company, not the comic book) has a nice blog post about how they think about experience design. To borrow, they point out:
1. Experience design is not just digital design (it is much more)
2. Experience design includes the design of customer experience
3. Designing experiences is an iterative process
At Inception, we are also focused on the experience that our patients and our clinicians have when working in digital health — and this extends past the digital experience.
We are currently focused (behind the scenes) on redesigning our video visit experience. We have been looking closely at where video visits have had challenges, such as the in-app experience, reliability and resiliency of connections, and integration with other aspects of the care process, such as check-in and after-visit care. (I note that some challenges are related to wi-fi connectivity, network interference, and broadband access — important work for communities and public-private partnerships)
As with many other health systems, we rapidly expanded telemedicine to meet the needs during the start of COVID-19. We used tools available to us, and we also identified and began using new ones as well. We created workflows, and then new workflows… some of our connections are integrated into our EHR (and can manage check-in experience) and some are not (fewer steps for patients to get to the ‘value-add’ part, seeing their clinician). In the latter case, though, zooming out we see a suboptimal experience with multiple touch points to start a visit.
Slated for implementation later this fall, we are rebuilding our video visit experience to be the best it can be for patients, office staff, and clinicians. We will work through several questions:
- How may we improve the patient experience of connecting to a visit?
- How may we measure and improve connection resilience, to the extent possible?
- What would be the best clinician experience? Hard-wired stations? Mobile stations?
- How can we easily and effectively add in additional parties, including interpreters, family members, or social workers?
- How can we best integrate the experience into our EHR tools to enable medication review, visit-based questionnaires, and copayment collection?
Another body of work that we have recently undertaken focuses on longitudinal care experiences outside of visits. Our first focus is on making it easy to see what preventive care is due and to have it scheduled.
We recently undertook a design sprint, a templated intensive full-day one week experience popularized at Google Ventures and described by Jake Knapp and Inception friend John Zeratsky. We brought together leaders, subject matter experts, communications specialists, and technologists and focused on design for engagement. By the end of the week, we had a prototype created that we could test with patients and collected valuable feedback. The up front investment in design of the entire experience helps answer questions early and then let’s us hand to our engineering team for development.
We are continuing to learn and evolve. These two areas described above represent a pivot for us, from purchasing and stitching together services for an experience to the intentional design and build of the experience we want. Because of the iterative nature, we won’t have everything we want on day one, but we have direction and can move with purpose.
