Redesigning Healthcare Experiences
We help you empathise to improve your impact.
Every year, millions of patients suffer harm during their healthcare experience.
"In high-income countries, it is estimated that one in every 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care. The harm can be caused by a range of adverse events, with nearly 50% of them being preventable."
World Health Organization, 2019
What problems can we help you solve?
Problems such as:
poor patient and/or employee experiences and satisfaction
poor employee morale and performance
broken systems and processes
tasks, projects and initiatives that do not deliver on their goal, go over budget or take longer than planned.
We understand that you may:
have time and/or money constraints.
be expected to do more with less.
be too busy to innovate and improve.
need help to understand the true context.
need help to build awareness of what is working and/or not working.
need help to break silos and improve communication between teams and strategic partners.
We get it. Every industry and service we have worked with has similar problems.
What if you could:
We believe and have experienced that through putting people at the heart of how you do things, you will create a more positive workplace and patient experience.
Here is an example of empathising with patients by putting them at the heart of problem solving to improve their experience. Consider a patient entering a waiting room. Through our process, we seek to understand what a patient thinks, feels and does as they experience the service.
Using this understanding of their experience, our process allows us to identify strategies to improve their experience. For example the service could:
Our process enables you to better empathise and connect with your patients and/or employees and in turn, improve their experience with you.
Our approach to improving the problems you face (known and unknown), increases your patient and employee satisfaction by putting real-world insight at the forefront of the improvement process.
Human-centred design puts your patients and/or employees at the heart of the solution.
It is an approach to problem solving that develops solutions by involving the human perspective in all steps.
We will guide you through our highly effective, 5 day, human-centred design process to discover practical strategies, relevant to your specific context, which will make a positive difference to the problem you wish to solve.
Our team will assess where you are, help you identify where you want to be and show you how to get there through the following process.
As we work with you to assess your current context and help you identify where you want to be, we will reveal strategies to close the gap.
Strategies will encompass the lens of:
Your customised report will recommend practical strategies for you to implement and guide your next steps for each of these lenses.
Here is our process applied to improving patient feedback surveys.
Through our research we have found that questions like, “Were you happy with the level of healthcare you received at our practice?” and “How can we improve?” do not reveal the true patient experience. They are not framed in a way that can elicit tangible specifics from a patient that enable healthcare services to take action on.
These more effective questions to ask patients, revealed through our process, extract more specific feedback:
"At any point during your experience did you feel uncomfortable? If ‘yes’, what specifically made you feel this way?"
"At any point during your experience did you feel frustrated? If ‘yes’, what specifically made you feel this way?"
"At any point during your experience did you feel uncared for? If ‘yes’, what specifically made you feel this way?"
"Did you feel that the practitioner did everything within their control to help you to the best of their ability? If ‘no’, what specifically could the practitioner have done differently?"
"Do you feel that you are clear on the next steps for your health journey? If ‘no’, what specific questions or clarity is missing for you?"
The following patient feedback was received as a result of the new questions we created.
Through our insights we discovered that patients were satisfied when:
Patients were unsatisfied by:
The common experience for patients who were asked the more effective questions was that they "felt heard".
Here are some other real-world experiences that a human-centred approach could improve.
“The oncologist told us that my dad was not ready for palliative care, despite us expressing our concerns. He died shortly after that appointment and we struggled to provide him with what he needed to die peacefully.”
“The doctor was sitting back casually in his chair and making jokes during a very serious appointment about my dad’s terminal cancer. The doctor didn't make eye contact with my dad or us. He seemed extremely uncomfortable about dad’s terminal cancer diagnosis, avoiding the issue and in turn did not support us like we needed.”
“I was brought by ambulance to the hospital and I was only in the door when I was handed an invoice. I felt that them getting paid was more important than supporting my health.”
“The nurse came around to do her checks and complained about her stressful day, sharing that she couldn't wait to get home to a glass of wine. I felt disrespected and unseen considering I was lying in a hospital bed.”
“My dad was experiencing severe cancer related symptoms and the only solution provided was to go to emergency. This resulted in him sitting with a room of sick people for hours, which was very scary for us as he had basically no immune system. ”
“The triage nurse cut me off before I could finish explaining why I had come to the emergency department. I felt like I was wasting their time.”
“The doctor was very quick to disregard my concerns. He made me feel like I was overreacting and that I didn’t know what was and wasn’t normal for my own body.”
“I was being proactive about my health by asking the doctor what checks I could get to make sure I was healthy and had no issues I was unaware of. I felt stupid and frustrated when the doctor laughed at me, saying I was young and only to worry if I had symptoms.”
“I sought a second opinion from a new doctor and he immediately told me that my usual doctor had incorrectly diagnosed me but had no suggestions on what the correct diagnosis was. I felt confused and helpless.”
“I was struggling to find the specialist clinic within a hospital and I had to ask 3 different staff members for directions as they kept sending me in circles. I was already nervous for my appointment. The added stress and frustration did not help.”
Those that imagine how healthcare should be.
Yes. As we work through the process, we can chat about how we can support you post this specific engagement. We will discuss solutions with you later in the process. If we start talking about solutions now it will defeat the purpose of the process and may mean we are not solving the right problem or creating the most effective solutions.
That's great! Let us know and we can customise your investment to suit your needs. Email [email protected].
That’s ok. There are alternative approaches. For example, activities can be based on known knowledge, allowing you to empathise to a certain extent without jumping in and solving problems/creating change without considering them at all. User interviews can also be replaced with paper or electronic surveys.
Like in the example of the patient waiting rooms experience, we will share strategies for how you might solve the problems that are identified. We would not implement these strategies for you by creating the signs or placing arrows on the floor. In the example of the patient feedback surveys, we would recommend that you improve your survey questions with an example and you would need to engage us through a new initiative to have us write the questions for you.
No. It takes 5 days to complete the work and you can spread them out to suit your priorities and availabilities. You are not required for all 5 days. View 'The process' diagram earlier up the page for your time commitment.
Yep. You will need to cover the costs for any travel such as flights, accomodation, parking and commute time where we are required to travel outside of South East Queensland, Australia.
AUD$30,000 exc. GST.
Yes we do. This specific service is an extension to our business as usual activities. Our team have been personally impacted by poor experiences in the healthcare industry, with one experience of patient neglect leading to the sooner than necessary death of a loved one. As a result, we want to prevent this from happening to others by helping healthcare services and professionals to improve their patient care through this service and by donating to causes in the industry that we care about.
We accept credit card or direct deposit. You will be required to pay 50% upfront and 50% upon delivery of the report. When you click to "Start the process now", you will be given the next steps to process payments.
This experience was designed by our human-centred design practitioners at Belvista Studios. Through partnerships with companies all over the world, we have helped to solve problems and create impactful change.
References
World Health Organization, 2019. Patient Safety. [online] Who.int. Available at: <https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/patient-safety> [Accessed 15 February 2021].