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Reimagining Healthcare for Patients with Disabilities

Service Design | Digital & Physical Design | Design Research 

Context

The WHO estimates that 16% of the world’s population experience significant disability, this represents 1 in 6 people worldwide

We partnered with Northwestern medicine, to identify opportunities to improve the experience for patients with communication disabilities, coming to their ambulatory clinics for medical attention.

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Across their

+200

Locations

The prototypes

Designing a new experience for patients with communication disabilities includes multiple touchpoints and opportunities. During this project we had the opportunity to prototype multiple physical and digital solutions that we envision coming together to improve the service that Northwestern Medicine clinics offer.

My role

01.

COMMUNICATION DISABILITIES RESEARCH

Responsible for conducting  and consolidating secondary research to ensure me and my team had a good understanding the different types and complexities of communication disabilities, before we started our interviews.

02.

INTERVIEWS & OBSERVATION

Led the design and drafting of the interview guides, and attended all the interviews as the “questions” responsible. My role focused on coming up and consolidating all the follow-up questions for our interviewees, to ensure we had all the information we needed by the end of each interview.

We had the opportunity get the perspective from patients, clinic staff and nurses, doctors, speech and language specialists and management team of Northwestern Medicine.

02.

GENERATING INSIGHTS

As a team, we gathered all the information from our interviews and secondary research and evaluated it through different frameworks to identify insights from different perspectives.
I successfully designed and shared with our stakeholders the following frameworks:

  • 5E’s Patient journey

  • 5E's Evaluation

  • Service Blueprint

03.

PROTOTYPING AND PRIORITIZATION

Conducted multiple brainstorming sessions. Coming up with a first round of 10 quick prototypes, which we prioritized and narrowed down to 3 prototypes.

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Created a prioritization matrix, that allowed us to evaluate the impact and implementation time for every prototype. The implementation time considered timeframes for:

  • Test and get final prototype design

  • Develop business case and secure funding for the development and implementation

  • Roll out

Meanwhile the impact was defined by how well they aligned to the patient's needs we had identified during the research phase

We narrowed it down to 3 prototypes and I led the second prototype iteration for the Role Play Training program

Learnings

Accessibility as part of the design process

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This has been one of the most rewarding projects in my professional career because it allowed me to explore and integrate the accessibility perspective into my design process. 

Patient's and Healthcare practitioners perspective

Having the opportunity to talk with people who were able to provide the patient's perspective and the HCP's perspective helped me expand my understanding on the US Healthcare system. I believe this will be crucial to continue my journey as a healthcare industry professional

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