A Service system to improve female clinic experience

Service Design | Doctor-patient relationship | Breast Disease

Barriers should be reduced for female patients to go to hospital and check their breasts.

In China, many female patients miss the best time for breast cancer treatment due to untimely consultation or diagnosis. Complicated clinic experience and unfriendly hospital services make timely consultation not the first choice for women.

What can we do to improve their experience?

A service system for young female breast cancer preliminary examination was built specifically for a local hospital to improve private experience and to provide guides for female patients.

 01. Private Guide

An instructional guide to avoid asking embarrassing question about private part, and help patients quickly find their way to registration for the first time they go to the hospital.

 

 2. Improved waiting area experience

Educational brochures and digital contents help patients know better about themselves. Nurse consulting area is redesigned and become more friendly for chatting.

 

 3. Safe Curtain

Add visual barriers and instructions in the clinic room to Protect patients from chaotic situations and peeking.

 4. Info Form

Patients could pre-fill in the digital form to provide basic information during long waiting time. With precise description of symptoms, optimized expression of medical terms and instructions for better memorization of life details, one can improve efficiency and help doctors to diagnose.  

-Overview-

-Understand-

Desktop Research & Problem Scope

To better understand the severe situations. I made a series of desktop researches about major patients for the breast cancer, diagnosis time and methods, and the current situation in China. In order to understand pain points, analyze phenomenons to find design opportunities, I kept good summaries and visualized data from research.  I concluded some facts:

-Hospitals should be the first place to go, timely exams are recommended. The disease can be easily diagnosed and healed at its early stage.

-Chinese women are facing an increasing rate of breast cancer , however lots of them delayed diagnosis because of lacking of knowledge, economic issues, and high unwillingness.

Main Situations for breast cancer patients in China

Field Research & Target Audience

Since this is a project for the local hospital, our group put emphasis on how we can solve the problem from hospital’s perspective. Even we know that the public education is also an important part for women to raise their recognition, this will involve contributions from more social powers. The target groups will be females who should go to public hospitals for diagnosis. 

I arranged information from field research using methods from user journey map. This helped me better build the whole picture of patients experience.

Our group went to two hospitals. One is specialised for cancer treatment, one is for gynecological diseases. And several important process is compared during this research. The privacy issues, complex instructions and misleading information are shown to varying degrees in different hospitals.

Field Research in two hospitals

Interviews From different stakeholders

More stakeholders should be taken into account. I conducted interviews with young people who might face risks, and assisted with other team members to do in-depth interview an experienced doctor. New pain points are revealed: Long waiting time, repetitive work,  and patient’s anxiety.

Interview of different stakeholders

-Ideation-

Worked with team members, we analyzed the factors that make public hospitals a hard place to go. Based on research insights, I developed our target users, highlighting her experience and attitudes.

 Design Problems Analysis

 Persona

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Design Opportunities

After creating our character, I used the user journey map to simulate each process she would go through, and several design opportunities were found.

Privacy was tackled from the first step, unique instructions could be picked by those who are embarrassed to ask questions at the front table. Waiting areas could be designed more comfortable for the long waiting time. Some basic appliances can also be designed.
Design Proposal

This is service design investigating the environment and doctor-patient interaction process of breast cancer exam in hospital and it tries to solve the experience problem of breast cancer test section.

-Prototype-

Based on insights, and ideations. Four main spots in targeted and was redesigned for better service experience. I built the space model, and simulated the environment in SketchUp. I also designed high-fi interfaces for digital form during the waiting time.

 Design Functions

For each opportunity, our group decided on following the patient’s trip to improve the hospital’s environmental experience and, based on the communication need, to improve the information experience through digital interfaces and brochures

 Design Functions

As for the information form, based on information from doctors about some basic questions. I designed it to be easy-comprehensive digitally.

 Sketch 

 Stakeholder Analysis

Interfaces

# User Goals 1 Precise description of symptoms    >>>Visualized important body parts

# User Goals 2 Comprehension of professional medical questions   >>>Optimized the expression of scientific terms

# User Goals 3 Help better memorize life detail  >>>Humanized the tones of expressions

-Reflection-

This was a group project based on actual needs, we received approval from the client hospital when our group provide our strategies. I was happy to learn that some more professional brochures on breast cancer are being produced. This project made me more aware of the issues related to women’s quality of life and how to prioritize the users during the whole design process and its iterations.

Research control group

Yangpu District Central Hospital, is the target object of our design this time. As a general public hospital that specializes in breast diagnosis and is medium-sized. We selected two very different research subjects, and both are large public hospitals. To a certain extent, they amplify the problems women face in seeking medical care from different perspectives. One is the privacy issues faced by general hospitals and the communication issues faced by women’s hospitals while waiting. There is also the problem of optimizing the information guidelines they share, and the problem of doctor-patient conflict.

Information Visualization & Digitalization of Process

When it comes to communication between doctors and patients, specialized descriptive terms can be perplexing, and visualization can solve some problems very efficiently. For hospitals, where digitization would have been done by the doctors themselves to enter into the medical record library, public hospitals, on the other hand, can make good use of waiting time to enable patients to enter medical data themselves, also saving time for both parties.

interactive design and graphics

In the first version, the digital questionnaire was designed with abstract graphics to avoid embarrassment. After iterations, a better representation for patients is a pattern that is closer to the actual one. Therefore optimized the graphic.