Friction, Effort, Risk and Cost
A cancer diagnosis can be a struggle for people beyond their physical health and the many difficult emotions it brings. This means people affected by cancer often find themselves using the services of many organisations beyond the NHS. The idea behind Macmillan’s Improving Cancer Journey services is to help people find and interact with these organisations: to provide the ‘seamless service’ long dreamt of by the health and social care sector. The service is already a model for providing joined-up services, but with over 260 organisations connected to Glasgow’s Improving Cancer Journey service alone, Macmillan My Data Store is an opportunity to use person-centred data to make it truly seamless.
The difference between person-centric and organisation-centric approaches we discussed in the last post goes beyond data — they’re much bigger ideas. At Mydex CIC, we help provide person-centric data services by trying to understand everything from the individual’s perspective. This is because organisations are there to serve people, so the way that happens should be based on the individual’s experience. When this doesn’t happen, it causes difficulties where they needn’t exist for individuals as well as organisations and their front line teams.
When we’re approaching a project like Macmillan My Data Store, we begin by asking: ‘where’s the friction, effort, risk and cost?’
It’s a really useful way of understanding the problems we’re solving from the individual’s perspective. Here’s an example made up of things people said during our scoping project:
Let’s go through a few examples of how friction, effort, risk and cost are reduced by swapping organisation-centric thinking out and putting people at the centre:
In our last post, we discussed how organisation-centric data creates duplication. Most of us will be familiar with repeating the same things to our banks, the government, the council, and so on. When it’s a distressing thing we have to repeat, this becomes more than just an inconvenience.
For example, a person with cancer or somebody close to them may have questions about their prognosis, symptoms or treatment and would benefit from Macmillan’s Support line. To access that service, they could find themselves repeating information they already gave to a different cancer support service. This often means repeating potted versions of difficult and traumatic stories, which is exhausting for the people who have lived through them. With a person-centric approach, they’ll be able to give the service permission to access only the information in their PDS and avoid repeating themselves.
For those providing support, we find that duplication creates friction, because protecting people’s privacy means not sharing information. It also creates an equal duplication of effort, because this information doesn’t appear in computer systems by magic.
Improving Cancer Journey services have already been celebrated for freeing up time for health practitioners by matching the best person to people’s needs. Putting people at the centre of their journeys means reducing friction, effort, risk and cost for those on the front line too. This will lead to even better support for those who need it and a much more efficient service all round. In fact, Macmillan My Data Store will give link workers anywhere between three and eleven more hours per person they support.
We know that people affected by cancer are worried about the burden of remembering things: important information they may need — such as their National Insurance Number or CHI Number, their medications, the right people to speak to, meetings and appointments, etc.
Having everything in one place is efficient and makes information flow easily, but a PDS is not just about that. It’s about real access and control of data.
You might have a drawer full of documents somewhere near you just now: everything there is to hand. Imagine people supporting you could put things in it for you to refer to, and the drawer would open up and remind you of them if you wanted it to.
Macmillan My Data Store is more than just a vault: it will be a companion on people’s journeys, acting as a memory aid and a communication tool too. Putting people at the centre means understanding that personal data is anything people want it to be. People are empowered when they have choices.
Our next blog post will be about telling stories. We’ll be exploring the journeys people take to get things done and how reducing friction, effort, risk and cost can radically transform them.
