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Texas Health, one of the leading health care systems in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area, wanted to focus their business model to be more customer centric. Their mission is to improve the health of the people in the communities they serve. By focusing their resources, time, and energy, they can better anticipate consumers' needs and offer affordable and personalized products and experiences.
My role was to lead the research and strategy across different initiatives that came our way when thinking of how to improve the user experience. I focused on research discovery by conducting interviews, researching market trends, looking into comparative experience, creating conceptual ideas, and managing a team of designers to help empower Texas Health in rethinking a lot of their different business areas. Below are two projects I spearheaded to help define the strategy and design for new experiences at Texas Health.
Teamwork makes the dream work. This is especially true for referral navigation. Each player in the process has a critical role to fill, so when the ball is dropped by any player, the process breaks– causing the patient to be the one who suffers.
This project focused on looking into where the disconnects were for referrals within the Texas Health system. Patient Referral on average was losing about $4 million dollars a year when doctor's referred outside of the THPG network. But what was the reasoning? I helped perform a deep discover to understand where the gaps were in order to make recommendations on opportunities to help the business grow this area.
The first part of my process was leading the research activities to have a better understanding of the problems. I conducted several interviews with various groups who played a role in the referral process. This included talking with primary care physicians, referral navigators, and specialists.
Overall, I led and assisted in conducting over 43 interviews and 17 observations while analyzing 10 months of survey data.
After talking with several different groups of stakeholders from physicians to patients to navigators and specialists, I learned a lot of insightful information that helped plan what our next steps would be. I learned that while the process is fragmented and disjointed, individuals don't know the process is broken and therefore are creating shortcuts to help with their everyday responsibilities. Here are a few quotes that resonated with the research.
After the research and discovery phase was completed, I did started to synthesize that information to help tell a story to our stakeholders. The reason this was done was to first present a viable plan of action and show where the gaps and opportunities lie. I led the creation of 4 primary Future Experience themes to help improve the experience from a people, process, and technology perspective.
by creating transparency across the process, enabling proactive communication, and building systems of measurability to ensure success.
by focusing people on specialty tracks rather than trying to be a jack of all trades.
by establishing a robust and defined process that is consistently trained, regularly evaluated, and refined.
The next step was plotting out a journey map to help visualize what the process for referral navigation looked like today, and what were the gaps that needed improvement or primed for opportunity in rethinking the referral process. Here, I first started out in Miro in mapping out the experience based on the knowledge I gained from the research from a current state analysis. This then evolved into the final deliverable you see here where I worked closely with a visual designer to bring my flows to life. The stakeholders were immensely surprised at our findings, and even printed this out for their office to showcase where they should focus their initiatives on.
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"If this was a perfect program, we would not have all these lines come off the journey. We know the process is broken, but this really puts everything into perspective on where the fragments are and how we can improve them.
- Stakeholder
Part of the final deliverables for this project was to then provide concepts and direction on recommendations for improving the Referral Navigation process. Working collaboratively with my team, I spearheaded the initial brainstorm in coming up with solutions that we felt could make an impact on the process. Below are a few ideas I had a hand in designing and concepting out for the stakeholders. This would ultimately lead to a collaborative workshop I help plan where we could empower our stakeholders to think about the opportunities to improve the process, and create a future roadmap for the next few years.
The Heart & Vascular space is extremely crowded in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, and Texas Health is currently not seen as a leader in the metroplex area or nationally. Consumers are not choosing Texas Health, but rather it is being chosen for them. Depending on which facility a consumer visits and which doctors they see, they may have wildly different experiences.
I led the research initiatives in understanding the patient journey, identifying where missed opportunities were to help engage with consumers before intervention is needed and re-engage after intervention. This led to creating numerous opportunities for patient value via new products and services, bolstered by novel platforms for delivery.
As part of the research discovery, I conducted several interviews including speaking with 7 Physician Stakeholders and 15 Patient Consumers. This helped me gained an understanding of how the Heart and Vascular service was perceived at Texas Health, what the stakeholders envisioned the future for the program, and identify ways to support patients throughout their heart and vascular journeys while bring in incremental revenue to the space.
The second half of the research phrase was doing a deep market analysis of out in the wild products and services that Texas Health could implement into their H&V program. I researched over 15+ innovations in the Heart and Vascular space, and 10+ programs using cutting edge technology. This helped me then define new opportunities Texas Health could build into their program for pre, during, and post surgical heart procedures.
Most consumers had a great experience when they felt like they had a personal connection.
There are expectations that the more volume a facility does, the more experts the physicians become.
Consumers who have great experiences with Texas Health are willing to drive to a location regardless of the distance.
By having a deep understanding of what the patient journey looked like, I created a blueprint that mapped out new opportunities based on the various user types. This was a great way of visualizing where opportunities could arise based on the pre, during, and post surgery experience. I first created the blueprint inside of Miro to map content and insights. Then working with a visual designer, we brought the vision to life for our stakeholders for our final presentation of recommended future services and improvements for the H&V space.
