Shaping A Concept For Healthcare Products To Achieve High-Quality Patient Experience

Patient experience forms the foundation of the healthcare industry. It is the interaction between a patient and the healthcare system. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), patient experience measures whether common practices in a healthcare setting, such as clear communication, are occurring and at what frequency.

As the healthcare paradigm shifts towards value-based care, understanding and providing an optimal patient experience is more important than ever.

To improve the patient experience, many providers have turned to technology to facilitate operations and patient management. However, in this situation, the contradiction is that as more systems, software, and devices come online across the healthcare sector, it becomes increasingly difficult to allocate resources to best practices and most importantly; to focus on patient needs.

Now technology and IT companies are paying special attention to how providers or users interact with technology. This interaction between the user and the device can be described as User Experience (UX).

But what is user experience? User experience is a product's ability to be useful toward users' goals while minimizing frustration and inefficiencies. And it is the responsibility of the technology vendors to design UX that meets these criteria.

Did you know that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a poor user/patient experience?

However, the shift towards value-based care is enabling better UX to become a necessity rather than just a nice to have. A better UX can streamline productivity, improve the patient experience, and empower providers to do their best work.

Our Three Key Aspects for Better Design

Healthcare organizations are choosing technology that provides a better user experience for their physicians and administrators.

Intuitive systems that are easy to use will streamline time spent on software and provide more time to focus on patient needs and care. Thankfully, Creativity and innovation in AI are improving the user experience.

For our Think 360 product team, a healthcare app must be designed and manufactured with three key aspects in mind:

Efficient: Products, systems, and interfaces should not only be easy to use but should also provide an efficient way of accomplishing a task or objective. The process should be straightforward and the conversations along the way should be simple and follow a pattern.

Useful: The product must ultimately solve a problem for the user or the provider. Good UX design eases the problem and provides a solution that is centered around the target user and business.

Scalable: The way solutions function and are built, 1.) from an infrastructure standpoint, must be able to handle the load of a scalable business, and 2.) from a training and expectation standpoint, a process or trained pattern must be used during application may be repeated.

Our Process

User Research: We listen to our clients and users to define the problem

We always start with research. Coordinating with our mutual network of customers and partners helps us identify opportunities for improvement. From this feedback, it is easy to find out who the target users are, and what their goals, tasks, and pain points are.

To help us visualize the gaps, we map everything from tasks and processes to user feedback and satisfaction. It helps us to see opportunities and define the concept, functionality, and ultimately the success criteria of the new product or features.

Idea: Use user feedback to identify opportunities

The key to ideology is brainstorming. By producing multiple solutions and ideas, our team can see and consider alternative possibilities and potential constraints that may not have been considered initially.

We take a step back and think about how to solve the problem creatively - not just how to take the offline world and move it online. Then we validate the solutions internally by applying the criteria and objectives established in the research phase and then proceed to create a minimum viable product.

Prototype and Iterate: Validate Our Solution

Using prototypes, we present our ideas from our research stage to like-minded customers and partners. This is necessary to verify how useful our solution is for the user and business use cases.

We then conduct usability testing with users to identify where our solution does not meet the criteria and repeat the process until the product meets the objectives.

Wrapping Up

For Think360, the patient experience is about helping customers streamline communications and operations so they can focus on providing better, faster patient care. By using this process, we are providing solutions with an improved healthcare experience that ultimately reduces the software burden for physicians and administrators so they can focus on patient care and boost the overall patient experience with their organization.