11TO TRANSFORMIDEASTHE HEALTHCARE EXPERIENCE

INTRODUCTION

We work with a fair amount of healthcare clients but we’re not here to tell you how to operate your hospital.

“It is a profound irony that the more you know about a particular industry and the more experience you gain in it, the more difficult it can be to move forward.”

- The Innovator Who Knew Too Much, 2013 Harvard Business Review

Instead, we’d like to offer a perspective from 20 years of work diligently observing

and designing human experiences. We know how to connect people to places and

most importantly, we understand how to elevate the patient experience.

A top-down strategy is not likely to bring the innovation that the healthcare consumer is demanding.

Because of the complexity and regulation in the healthcare market, small steps in incremental levels will be what drives innovation across the industry.

The pROblem

ChaNges IN healThCaReThere are many macroenvironmental factors that have huge implications for healthcare, from the Affordable Care Act to the shifts in consumer (patient) behavior. Furthermore, the population is shifting: between now and 2050, the over-65 demographic will double in size.

Patient delivery method preferences have also changed. In 1980, outpatient surgeries totaled just 16 percent. Today, that number is more than 60 percent.

1DesIgN aN eXpeRIeNCe

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This is beginning to happen in healthcare. The Cleveland Clinic has created a position of Chief Experience Officer.

The provider is creating printed materials and an online interactive video for incoming patients, describing the hospital environment and procedures, including rationales for care. It also educates them about pain management and how to best communicate with care providers.

What does the patient experience actually look like? To determine something like that, you need to look at the best. And no one knows the magic of an experience like Disney.

From the very beginning, Disney has been completely committed to a transformational experience. Recently, they created the “My Disney Experience” online tool that allows visitors to completely design and plan their trip. It includes hotel recommendations, dining and theme park options.

Delivered in real time with maps, wait times and event schedules, this

tool gives visitors exactly what they are looking for, when they are looking for it.The patient doesn’t know exactly

what they need. How can we deliver personalized, engaging experiences?

2eNgage emplOYees

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Many of our healthcare clients are concerned with staff turnover.

As a way to connect employees to the vision and inspire them at work, we collaborated with a healthcare client to design a personalized experience. The project reinforced the organization’s mission while allowing employees to view their schedule or read/send notes to their colleagues.

This experience is vastly different from entering next to the loading dock. What kind of improved patient outcomes might this inspire?

In 2009, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported that the cost to replace a full-time registered nurse is $36,567.

The patient experience is influenced by many things, but a very critical piece of that is the care team. An engaged employee base can make or break an organization’s fulfillment and speed toward their vision.

What is your employees’ experience of your brand?

3FaCIlITaTe ChOICe

Consumers want information that’s relevant to them. So how can healthcare providers make a connection? The answer is to facilitate choice.

The Harvard Business Review’s essay on this recommends three tactics that we subscribe to when designing any experience:

• Minimize the number of information sources consumers need to make a decision

• Provide trustworthy sources of information

• Allow consumers to weigh options by identifying features that are most relevant to them

Word-of-mouth and location have been the mainstay of attracting patients, but referrals are much more powerful drivers of decision-making.

This is largely because we are overwhelmed with choice and many marketing campaigns don’t fit our lifestyle expectations.

Too much choice leads to indecision and ultimately, a delayed or frustrating experience.

IDEA

“Many brands lead consumers down confusing purchasing paths. The savviest ones simplify and personalize the route.”

- Harvard Business Review

4OFFeR paTIeNTs Real-TIme INFORmaTION

FACT

The rise of big data is a reality and in fact, there is a growing amount of evidence that suggests patients make better decisions about their care when they are fully informed.

Real-time information could alleviate preference misdiagnosis from doctors (or over-diagnosis) and play to the growing trend of collaborate care – away from the doctor-knows-best-model.

Doctors at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, Canada have taken interactive gaming to the next level when they hooked up a Kinect console to their medical imaging computer.

Now, doctors have direct access to MRI scans when in the operating room, without having to disinfect, leave the OR, consult the scans and then scrub back in. This hack allows them to virtually manipulate the scans and retrieve the necessary information by pulling it up on screen with a wave of their hand.

What if great care team coordination was transparent enough to include the patient? How could patients use real-time data to drive decisions?

5eNCOURage CONNeCTIVITY

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Sporting Innovations tailored a back-of-house app to help them flex stadium staffing and inventory to meet the real-time demand of their patrons.

Could a similar system be developed for patient registration and flow? The possibilities are endless, but the power is in the connectivity.

The levels of touch consumers demand can vary dramatically from person to person. Everyone comes to the hospital in a different state of mind, from panicked in the ER to early for an appointment with their ENT.

People also come with different levels of comfort with technology. There are many hospitals experimenting with self-diagnosing kiosks and even some point-of-care testing. A study by Beth Israel found that allowing patients to self-register reduced overall registration time with user satisfaction rates of more than 90 percent.

What if there was a path tailored for each individual that interacts with the hospital?

6leVeRage TeChNOlOgYTReNDs

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Our appetite for data in the U.S. has exploded. Much of this is being user controlled (think Nike Fuel band) but it has broadly reached the dining experience, retail model and vacation destinations.

We work with many organizations to help them better understand their consumer. This includes building consumer personas based on use, asking and observing how they interact and how they prefer to interact and making recommendations for improved targeting.

How we interact with our friends is shaping consumer expectations. Nearly 1,200 hospitals participated a 2011 PwC study that found approximately one-third of consumers were using social media for healthcare purposes.

While this isn’t too surprising, the fact that more than four times as many people were using Facebook than WebMD and three times as many people were using YouTube than WebMD is shocking.

The conversation is happening. How can hospitals leverage their potential and provide value to the consumer outside of their core offering?Shaping customer relationships and

enhancing their satisfaction through the use of data and technology will be business critical in the coming years.

7ReINVeNT peRsONal TeChNOlOgY

Research completed by Herman Miller has found that, “[o]ne of the worst things as a patient is not having control over what is happening to you or around you. Giving a patient some measure of control, as simple as easy access to their personal things, goes a long way toward improving a patient’s experience.”

Greater social engagement helps people live longer and healthier lives. What if there was technology to help patients with extended hospital stays engage with their surroundings and their community?

A company called Double Robotics offers a remotely controlled wheeled stand that displays an iPad. Functionality includes rolling and turning in all directions and raising and lowering the screen.

What if doctors could make house calls, or what if a robot be programmed to be a wayfinding concierge? In the patient room itself, could something like the gesture recognition capabilities of an xBox Kinect be leveraged to open blinds, control temperatures and lighting?

What does a truly connected patient experience look like?

QUOTE

8OWN The WellNessmODel

How could a funding model leverage innovative personal technologies to deliver better wellness care or disease management in a person’s home, at their leisure?

Engaging people with a healthcare brand to encourage and enable control over their own wellness, such as in a patient-owned emergency room, is exciting.

Care is moving upstream. The model is shifting from one where health systems wait for conditions to become acute (care occurs high-cost medical centers) to one that is focused on prevention, treating patients proactively in their own environment.

A broad and collaborative look at the care team, including the patient, may lead to better health outcomes and reduced costs. Instead of relying on the infrequent office visit, enable patients to seek it out while feeding in data. The potential for connections that speed diagnoses and trigger actions such as an office visit is vast.

So what can your organization do to leverage the expertise of the hospital and engage or even delight customers?

What if your value proposition was actually about delivering trusted health advice at the right moment regardless of location?

IDEA

9leaRN FROm The sUCCess OF ReTaIl

IDEABeckers reports that in order to survive in a consumer-driven era, hospitals need to provide transparency on price, quality and services as well as deliver a high level of customer service, thinking more like Nordstrom’s than a health provider.

Burberry opened a new flagship store in London that fully integrates technology to build their brand message and enhance the purchasing experience. Building on their London roots and strong raincoat, galoshes and umbrella product lines, interactive screens show a strong rain throughout the store at timed intervals.

The screens also read each piece of clothing in the store via RFID chip to show consumers runway models walking with that particular piece of clothing and also other products that match and complement what they are interested in.

Burberry’s goal was to “focus not only on improving the customer’s

shopping experience, but on how to give each client a personalized experience according to their needs and expectations.”“Hospitals are much-trusted players

in consumers’ local health markets. They have the opportunity to leverage that trust in the consumer era by becoming more retail-oriented.”

- Becker’s Hospital Review 2012

Image courtesy of Architectural Digest

10maNage The 360

The Cleveland Clinic defined the patient experience as everyone and everything people encountered from the time they decided to go to the clinic until they were discharged. Their effort to improve it became known as “Managing the 360.”

Your brand experience begins before the patient enters the hospital and continues long after they leave.

What does your experience map look like? What are your patients saying they love or hate about interactions with your brand?

Restrictions that level the playing field in the healthcare market also leave only a few places for competitive differentiation.

FACT

11CONsIDeR CORpORaTe sOCIal RespONsIbIlITY

The Harvard Kennedy School’s definition, says corporate social responsibility covers not only what companies do with their profits, but also how they make them.

Beyond philanthropy and compliance, this principle addresses how companies manage their economic, social, and environmental impacts, as well as their relationships in all key spheres of influence: the workplace, the marketplace, the supply chain, the community and public policy.

What if there was a national model to deliver world-class patient care to disaster stricken areas? Last month, Hospitals of Hope sent their Clinic-In-A-Can to Oklahoma to deliver care to a community in desperate need.

How could your organization leverage this idea and send your expertise out to help others? Could your patient experience exist in a physical location outside of your campus?

Many organizations have ample charitable activities, ours included. But do they all support the underlying mission?

CSR needs to align with the reasons the organization gets up in the morning.

FACT

A top-down healthcare revolution is not coming. KPMG reports in their 2013 Global Healthcare Summit that “major transformational change can no longer be delayed.” It is a matter of when, not if.

bIblOgRaphY

KPMG Global Healthcare Summit, 2013Harvard Business Review, “The Innovator Who Knew Too Much,” 2013

Becker’s Hospital Review, 2012

PwC Health Research Institute Annual Report, 2011

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Evaluation of the Wisdom at Work Initiative,” 2009

Are you striking the balance

between operating in the short-term

and innovating for the long-term?

abOUT DI

Dimensional Innovations is in the business of building ideas, fueled by the art and science of creating experiences.

Our passion is bringing experiences to life through compelling design, immersive environments and unparalleled interactivity.

As an experiential design, fabrication and innovation firm, we help companies and brands connect with, inspire and engage their audiences.

We want to hear from you! Tell us your stories of healthcare experiences and how you see them changing in the future.

dimensional innovationswww.dimin.com913.384.3488

Thoughts and musings in this piece provided by The Innovation Lab at Dimensional Innovations.

Stephen Hopkins, Director of Innovationshopkins@dimin.comJosh Hoffeld, Lead Designerjhoffeld@dimin.comLindsey Weber, Lead Fabricatorlweber@dimin.com