For this service design project, our team worked with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation to identify design opportunities for Dr. Amin Kassam’s Neurosurgery Clinic. Due to being able to perform a rare brain surgery by going through the patient’s nose rather than cutting open the skull, Dr. Kassam’s once-a-week clinic is overwhelmed with patients.

Our team spent a fair amount of time at the clinic observing and interacting with patients. We worked closely with the staff and shared our process and insights with them every step of the way, which built trust and gained their support. This enabled us to gain access to patients in the exam room and interactions between Dr. Kassam, his staff, and patients. We also shared our concepts with the patients, iterating as much as we could to refine our ideas and final solution.

Team

• Melissa Cliver
  Interaction Design
• Jamin Hegeman
  Interaction Design
• Kipum Lee
  Interaction Design
• Leanne Libert
  Communication Planning and Information Design
• Kara Tennant
  Communication Planning and Information Design

Deliverables

• Dr. Kassam welcome booklet
• Concept and process documentation
• Clinic Chat concept video

Process

After many visits to the clinic, we had to sort hundreds of photos and observations.

Me, during a group meeting to synthesize the data.

Service blueprint of the patient experience highlighting opportunities for engagement.

We engaged with patients to get input and feedback as our concepts developed.

We generated and visualized numerous concepts through words and sketches.

Concept storyboards generating to solicit patient feedback.

In trying to understand the emotions and needs of the patients during their journey, we created this visualization, which we included in our final book for UPMC.

Concept rendering.

Page layout from the welcome booklet we created as an artifact UPMC could implement right now.

Visualization of the ideal interaction between patients, Dr. Kassam, and his staff.

Page from the book delivered to UPMC.

A system overview of Clinic Chat.

A part of our research, we went to the OR to see Dr. Kassam perform brain surgery.

More process and solution photos

Well, actually it’s not. In addition, we are also providing the clinic with a design guide that outlines our research, observations, insights, and possible concepts that they can reference as they continue to shape the clinic into a more ideal vision.

Service design is a holistic approach that focuses on understanding the service first before introducing products into the service. I see it as applying design thinking to a system to understand what products or behaviors might impact the system in a positive way, with a perspective that all elements within the system, from product to human behavior, are interrelated and form the service.

What this means is that there are intangibles that make up a service that you can design for but not actually see manifested in the form of a product. This is what has been making me feel uncomfortable, as the potential impact of our efforts and deliverables are not easily viewable.

Despite this discomfort, I know the small communication design piece will have an immediate impact on the patient experience and quite likely the way the clinic sees itself, which may lead to further positive changes in their behavior. And that’s not something I would have felt comfortable about without having done all the research in order to understand how all the parts of the service affect each other.

The design guide—also a print piece—will serve to embody the presence of our design team and of design thinking in the clinic. Embody design thinking? Yes. We found that by having us around and sharing our process and perspective helped the clinic staff make immediate changes in the way they viewed their work and the patient experience, which led to behavioral change that we had not expected. The great thing was that the staff would openly confess to being inspired by our presence and perspective to make changes themselves. This is definitely an intangible that we’ve essentially already delivered. But it’s difficult to see without a bit of reflection.

The aforementioned might not have been successful without having formed a good relationship with the clinic staff. This is a key point to service design. The people who deliver the service need to be on board with what you are doing. To this end, involving them in the process early and often is highly important. We accomplished this by presenting our initial research findings with lots of photos of them and quotes from them to show that we understood their experience. There was an immediate change in their behavior toward us after that because they then saw us as their colleagues.

So while the only design artifact we are introducing that patients will see is a small print piece, how it relates to the whole, and the behind-the-scenes design guide, and the other intangibles I mentioned, means that we are delivering a lot more than is apparent by looking at the individual artifacts. Understanding that relationship is the point of service design.