Creating warm & effective healthcare experiences
US Healthcare System
Atrius Health is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the Northeast that delivers an effective system of connected care for adult and pediatric patients. Though it has served for more than 740,000 adult and pediatric patients, they noticed lower percentages in satisfaction from their 18-29 year old patients and would like to learn more about why that’s happening.
For this project, I collaborated with student data analysts and designers to explore the experience of millennials (roughly 18-29 year olds) as it relates to their most recent healthcare visit. Our goal was to identify the biggest problems to solve for and to explain how those problems are experienced by individuals.
Role: UX Researcher | Timeframe: 1 month | UX Class Project
Research Questions
How do millennials define healthcare?
What are their health care related needs?
What are the ways they currently interact with their care provider(s)?
How successful is the current experience? What opportunities are there to simplify the existing experience?
Research
Literature Review
We looked at studies on how millennials are challenging the existing healthcare system. Here are a few ways we found:
They take care into their own hands, and prefer on-demand healthcare services when needed.
They do their research, trusting peers more than physicians.
They want up front cost estimates, and are willing to put off care if the bill is too expensive.
They want apps - lots of them, and demand convenience, availability, accessibility, and great customer service.
“Healthy”means more than “not sick”, and includes eating healthy and exercising as part of their definition of overall health.
They prefer to shop for healthcare insurance online, often choosing healthcare insurance and providers based on cost alone.
User Cases
Through studying the user cases provided in literature review and by Atrius Health, we identified three major process of a typical healthcare experience.
This includes:
How millennials access their healthcare provider to request information and/or book appointments
Interactions with medical assistants, nurse practitioners, doctors, and/or lab technicians during their office visit
Follow up care such as prescription services and/or medical advice.
Brainstorm
We spent an hour brainstorming the actions, emotions, thoughts, contexts, and touchpoints that might be experienced by millennials in the healthcare system. We generated this board based on data collected from prior research and our personal healthcare experiences as millennials.
(This board was later used as reference to guide survey and interview design)
Survey & Interview
We launched an online survey then conducted 8 in depth user interviews.
From the 111 responses we collected in online survey, all participants provide positive responses on how knowledgeable or professional their healthcare providers were. However, we discovered that patients need healthcare providers to show more efforts in understanding their feelings and to be more attentive to different emotional needs.
Most frequent words generated from response for the question “Is there anything the healthcare provider can do to improve your overall experience?
We were able to hear more detail experiences during the interview session. Through qualitative analysis, we found a relationship among healthcare providers’ professional competency, the quality of communication and interaction with patient, as well as the patient experience for the visit.
We discovered that all participants tried to identify how knowledgeable or how competent their healthcare provider is before disclosing anything. If they think the provider is incompetent, their healthcare visit usually ended poorly. If the participant thinks the healthcare provider is competent and had good communication and interaction, they were more satisfied with the experience. However, several participants indicated that their worst medical experiences was with competent healthcare providers, but had horrible communications or felt indifference during treatments.
In both survey and interview session, we did not find a lot of concerns over healthcare providers’ professional competency, which place more weight on the quality of the provider-patient interaction.
According to the interview result, no matter how skillful the healthcare provider was, if there was ineffective communication or cold interactions, patients reported having unpleasant healthcare experience. Our findings highlighted the importance of having good communications and to relate with patients’ feeling when they need emotional support.
Research Strategies
To better understand user journey in healthcare experience and identify user pain points, we created user journey maps and personas. At the end we were able to further understand users’
Wants and Needs:
To stay physically and mentally healthy
To feel comfortable discussing medical concerns with her care provider
To get medical advice from her care provider about completing her transition
Frustrations:
Trying to make a doctor’s appointment that works with their busy schedule
Not feeling understood or cared for by their care provider
Making sure clinic has insurance info when needed
Black, transgender woman.. She has been living in the Cambridge area for several years now and is glad to have such easy access to hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the Boston area. She works out regularly and tries to eat healthy. She has begun taking estrogen as a result of male-to-female transition. She suffers with chest pain as a result of asthma and estrogen medication.
Findings
According to all the user research conducted above, we found two primary needs of:
People want more effective and transparent communications when interacting with the healthcare system
People need warm and affective human connections from healthcare providers
Considerations
The next step for this project is to brainstorm strategies and new ideas for enhancing the interaction quality between patients and medical professionals. We believe creating warm and effective human connections should be prioritized.
We think that if there are more training on cultural and gender sensitivity issues for healthcare providers, this could provide them with strategies on how to effectively communicate, and how to bring more warmth and empathy to patient.
We think that the US healthcare system, in general, should also provide mental health support and warm human connections for medical professionals. If healthcare providers are being taken care of by the system, they can also have the mental capacity to care about the needs of their patients and want to give them the best care possible. This will result in overall better health care for the patient and better communication between the care provider and the patient.
