Service design Innovation Case Study
The initial process was started with two great guests from NYU Langone Health and FuturePractice lab. Our sponsors gave us the opportunity of service design innovation targeted towards Patients that were Sexual and gender minorities (SGM). Our sponsors briefly gave us some examples of how even the smallest changes within a system can significantly change an experience in a hospital. The initial question we were given was “ How might NYULH improve its patient experience to be more inclusive, supportive, and positive for people who are transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer?”
At week one, Our first objective was to conduct secondary research. Since I did not have enough background regarding NYULH and LGBTQ Health, secondary research was crucial. Thankfully, our sponsors provided us with some resources we could work with which involved, Barriers to health care for transgender individuals or the burden and needs of the transgender population. A lot of the articles mentioned talked about individual experiences in which SGM feel uncomfortable when they visit the hospital or experience issues when they try to contact employees at the hospital. Some of our findings included “unique healthcare setting related barriers to this population include fear of disclosing sexual orientation or gender, due to perceived discrimination, lack of healthcare professional knowledge and/or negative views of LGBTQ persons, and lack of sufficient access to culturally-sensitive healthcare resources and referrals”
As for week 2, we continued our initial research and engaged in using more resources from social media. One of our main sources was from Facebook. Facebook seemed to have a lot of groups in which emphasized a lot of LGBTQ issues and made it stand out. One interesting resource we found was a podcast on Spotify in which one SGM person wanted to receive bottom surgery however, she was mistreated and had the worst experience in terms of employees making her uncomfortable during the procedure as well as the doctor himself just throwing words such as do you want “do you want the bottom or top surgery” This podcast gave us a great idea regarding the idea of education employees receive when it comes to treating SGM patients. What kind of education are employees receiving and how much awareness do they have regarding treatment for SGM patients?
On week 3, We realized that we should conduct some interviews in order to get an in-depth feel of what actually happens inside NYULH. Our team member Caroline was able to reach in contact with one of the nurses at NYULH. The interview helped us gain insight Into the education process for employees at NYULH. The nurse told us that there weren’t any specific procedures or protocols when it comes to treating SGM patients. She mentioned that nurses don’t really have many opportunities to make contact with LGBTQ Patients which meant that they did not really know how to reach out to them. So we came up with a new problem statement of education of employees being a clear issue within NYULH. SO our first prototype was 2 brochures with guidance for both the patient that NYULH takes a lot of consideration into planning and guiding patients within their comfort zone. The other brochure was for employees to give them enough information so that when the employees meet patients, they won’t have as much uncertainty on how to approach SGM patients as before. With this idea, Our “How Might We” question came up to be “How might we clearly and easily communicate all the NYULH healthcare resources to individuals who are transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer?”
For week 4, we were finally about to reach out to one of the liaisons in NYULH LGBTQ Health. Kevin was one of the employees who basically made contact with all of the LGBTQ Patients and lead them to the corresponding doctors or medical centers. Kevin gave us great insight especially in terms of how there were so many LGBTQ patients however they were confused on who and how to reach out to him. Kevin emphasized a lot on how his patients were not able to find the right contact information so a lot of his patients had to go through a lot of trouble to find the correct person to talk to within the hospital. Kevin highlighted some important facts about the NYUH website and how it did not have adequate information for patients and the contact and bio section was terrible. After the interview, we took a deep dive into finding touchpoints in our current NYULH website. As Kevin mentioned, there was no specific contact information or any additional information for patients to access. The homepage was dull and the graphics seemed meaningless. Also, there were not many links or tabs in which patients could access which made it very difficult for even us to find contact information. Thanks to Kevin’s interview we were able to compare other LGBTQ websites such as Mount Sinai and Upenn Medical websites. These websites had more welcoming images as well as vast amounts of information such as handbooks for employees and specific information about surgical procedures. All of these touchpoints on different websites were very appealing which lead to our new reformed problem statement. “The NYULH Transgender Health website does not translate to a welcoming and well-communicated health care resource for transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer individuals.” with this new problem statement we redesigned the website with more colors and links and especially a big “request a callback” tab for patients who just wanted to talk on the phone and simplify the procedure. At this point, our problem and solution became very clear and narrowed down for presentation.
For week 5, we did an online/offline presentation with all of our team members participating and sharing our journey through this project. Our storytelling method went in a funnel type way in which we stated the initial problem statement and narrowed it down to our new empowering problem statement, displaying our touchpoints and finally providing our key solution to the initial problem addressed. I was personally very satisfied with the presentation and the sponsors' feedback was very flattering. I was glad that the guests really enjoyed our presentation and understood exactly what our goal was in this project. We were so glad that they felt great satisfaction especially in the callback tap and future focuses we could do. One thing we could have done more was test our prototype more out in the field to see if people felt a difference.
For my final thoughts, I feel like this project was very insightful especially in the field of healthcare and SGM in which I had never had the opportunity to dig into. The skills learning in service design innovation class was a great opportunity to test out in real-time projects and see what outcomes it could bring. The whole class felt like a journey map and hope to see more of myself drawing my own journey map for myself in terms of my career and solving out my future path.
