We often hear that to solve many of today’s healthcare systems problems we need to start (re)putting patients at the center. “Engraining patient-centrity throughout services and process” has become a sort of industry catch-phrase, with many variations that have highlighted the importance of taking the concept of patient experience to a more profound level and that have also started to gain wider public attention through patient associations campaigns, such as for example the “No decision about me, without me” led in the UK few years ago.
I’ve been investigating care personalization and integration since I’ve become an healthcare technology analyst many moons ago. From the conversations I had with healthcare executives across Europe, it’s clear that becoming a patient centric organization to deliver superior care services experience is paramount. The consequences of failing in this goal are further emphasized by the transition toward value based healthcare business models, where the creation value for patients is a pillar.
Many organizations are tuning toward digital transformation to create more dynamic and patient centric care services and processes. Healthcare CIOs are aware of the need to serve the relationship with patient with new solutions, but many have launched new apps or new digital services, only to find that response is lukewarm, and uptake is limited, despite the apparent value of the offering.
Patients expect healthcare organizations to provide personalized and convenient solutions, as the one that use in everyday life for example when they are shopping or working. To be successful in such situations, healthcare executives will need to adopt new ways of identifying and solving business opportunities and problems. Design thinking has proven to be a powerful tool in ensuring demand for products and services in many industries and, I think, it should be in the toolkit of any healthcare organization who intends to pursue a patient centric digital transformation.
Design thinking is the approach that Arsenàl.IT, the research & innovation center for digital health of Veneto region ( Italy), adopted to develop a new mobile service that allow citizens to manage their prescriptions dispensing and remote renewal requests. Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to host them for the first episode of our IDC Health Insights Show&Tell Webinar Series, where they presented how they moved away from the traditional development paradigm and introduced a set of methods aimed at understanding how to maximize end-users benefits and at delivering superior patient experience.
During the webcast Arsenal.IT explained how design thinking helped them to strike a balance between technological feasibility, economic viability, and desirability. From design, to prototype, to testing, to evaluation of the new mobile app, Arsenàl.IT was able to leverage a multidisciplinary co-creation approach with a broad range of population segments, capturing unmet needs. Despite the challenges faced, related in particular to the negotiation of design issues between users, technical team and developers, the mobile app resulted usable (95.4% of task completed) perceived as user-friendly and just in few weeks and without significant communication campaigns actively used by more than 60% of the targeted population. Arsenàl.IT also showed how this approach is helping them shaping a broader methodological and organizational framework for user-centered design to deliver a true patient-centric experience in future digital solutions they will be working on.
Arsenàl.IT was open to share their experience and lessons learned and I invite you to listen to the recording of the webcast to hear firsthand about the ingredients of their secret sauce of success. In a sense, I think that there wasn’t a better way to start our Show&Tell series.
By blending digital and real world, business and consumer experiences digital transformation brings new classes of challenges and opportunities to healthcare leaders. They require different ways of framing and innovating solutions to care processes’, employees’ and patients’ needs. With this webinar series, at IDC, we would like to bring you some real case examples in which healthcare organizations are not only adopting new technologies but embracing the opportunities that technology offers to redesign and optimize processes, to support decisions with real world evidence, to change the relationship within and outside the organization.
So, if you want to hear more stories like the Arsenàl.IT one, and know the who, what, where, when and why of the upcoming IDC Health Insights Show&Tell webcasts, please join our IDC Health Insights EMEA Linkedin group and follow IDC Health Insight EMEA analysts on Twitter. Stay tuned!