Still Diverging
A lot has happened since our last update in January. Most importantly, we held our first meeting with our clients, Eric and Zach, the very next day! We gathered our materials (and lunch), hopped in an Uber, and headed down to their office in downtown Pittsburgh.
01. Kickoff Meeting
We started off by establishing our goals for the meeting and the project as a whole to ensure that our team and the clients were all on the same page. We then went through both our preprepared stakeholder map and service blueprint to show Eric and Zach what our understanding was and to get their input in some holes we had while we created the two diagrams on our own (e.g. the inner workings of Highmark). We closed off the meeting by identifying the most important pain points (out of a bazillion) on our diagrams and what assumptions we made. As Eric and Zach filled us in, we learned a great deal regarding Highmark and their key stakeholders.
Overall, it was a successful kickoff meeting.
We…
- Established rapport
- Were well prepared with our artifacts, which allowed us to get everything done in time
- Had everyone up and near the artifact → engaged
Although many aspects of the meeting went well, there were a couple of aspects we can improve on:
- To keep the momentum of standing going (especially after lunch)
- To gauge other’s energy level and plan accordingly (e.g. not put the most intensive activity towards the end)
- To always have someone documenting
02. Research Plan
After taking a couple of days to digest all the information we gathered, we started to identify a combination of relationships amongst the stakeholders and what kinds of questions we had regarding each relationship.
We saw multiple high-level groupings emerge: patient-employer-insurance, patient-doctor-insurance, patient-Highmark-customer service, etc. We noticed that we had the most stemming from “Patient/Member” (e.g. Patient/Member to Employer, Patient/Member to Insurance Company) — a group we had the quickest and easiest access to. We decided to start interviewing this group first and simultaneously start recruiting for the other groups since recruiting medical reps and doctors will take more time.
As we started to list the people we could interview, we also simultaneously started to group people into categories such as:
- Has dependents
- Is a caregiver
- Has a major milestone coming up (like a baby or marriage)
- Was injured recently
- Is employed
We tried to get as diverse a group of people as possible, in terms of age and experience with health insurance, to interview for the following two weeks. We were mainly interested in understanding what they understood about their insurance plans and to see if different circumstances influenced their level of knowledge about insurance. You can find our draft interview guide for different stakeholders here.
We are currently still in the middle of interviewing this group of stakeholders. In the next couple of weeks, we plan on diving into other groups like healthcare providers (e.g. hospital admins, MAs, residents) and employers (e.g. Carnegie Mellon University, small and large business owners) to understand what their roles and experiences are in dealing with health insurance. We are currently planning recruitment for the participants in that category.
We shall keep you all posted on our findings from our first round of interviews in our next post (:
03. Quick & Dirty Pretotyping
Based on what we gathered so far (mainly from secondary research and our kickoff meeting), we went through the Crazy 8 ideation activity (while listening to “Crazy Frog”) to rapidly generate “solutions” to the question of: How might we help the public better understand their health insurance?
You might be thinking to yourself, “Solution?! Isn’t it too soon?” We had the exact same thought when we were presented with the task from our advisors. We were confused about how we were supposed to even generate a single solution when we thought we knew so little. But, to our surprise, we knew enough to generate our versions of “ideal” scenarios.
Our ideas ranged from having a lawyer follow you around the hospital to having a barcode embedded in your skin to stuffing medical bills with confetti — we clearly had a lot of fun. As we walked through everyone’s ideas, we mashed up bits and pieces of different solutions and ended up with the following solution for our pretotype.
To walk you through our beautiful storyboard, let’s say you broke your arm while skiing. You go to the doctors to get it checked out, to take an X-Ray, and to…whatever else the doctor makes you do. Because the problem arose in the “invisible provider” (e.g. anaesthesiologist who you never meet in person) and the factor of unpleasant surprise when you keep getting bills you can’t recognize, we implemented a system where you scan a bracelet after every procedure you receive during your visit to make everything transparent. The scan will tell you what treatment you received, what other factors contributed to that treatment (things that go on behind the scenes) and if your insurance plan covers that or not. By providing all this information upfront, we thought and hoped that it will reduce the frustration and anger caused by the endless stream of bills you receive months after your procedure.
For our testing session, we transformed our room into “The A Team Hospital” where we had Celine’s desk as the check-in counter, Stephanie’s as the doctor’s room, Corey’s as the radiology room, Ekta’s as the anaesthesia room, and Griffin’s as the surgery room. We split people into two groups: both groups received a bracelet, but only one group got to experience the new system. None of the participants were told that there were two groups. The group who got to experience the new system scanned their bracelet before they left each station. After they scanned, they immediately got a notification on their bracelet telling them what procedure they received and if it was covered, partially covered, or not covered by their insurance plan. After a couple of days of this experience, we sent all of our participants a fake bill to see if there was a difference between the two groups in the way they perceived the bill. We hypothesized that the group who experienced the new system would be less frustrated, confused, and mad with the bill because they were already told what types of procedures they received and if those were covered by their insurance or not.
We’re still in the process of testing our pretotype…but we’ll let you know what we find asap!
Until then… keep learning about your health insurance plan!!! The more we learn about this space, the more we feel the great need to pay attention to this area #adulting.
- The A Team
