Service design in healthcare

In healthcare, there is more and more talk of service design: designing services around a better experience for people, and extending the patient journey through digital touchpoints.

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What is service design?

A short definition of service design is surprisingly hard to give. To grasp the scope of the discipline, people often turn to diagrams and process graphics, which are useful for showing how the work is structured, but are not enough to describe its human side.

The real foundation of the discipline is systemic thinking, and the creation of multidisciplinary teams able to build solid relationships over time. In other words, service design is about designing services that work, and it looks after the needs of the organisation that offers the service and of the people who will use it. To make that possible, you have to design the relationships between those who use the service and those who benefit from it, and between the people behind the scenes and any third-party suppliers.

A service designer therefore has a duty to support pleasant relationships and a good experience for every stakeholder involved. They design relationships, connections, processes and experiences; every touchpoint has to be integrated with an eye not only to function, but also to usability, clarity, aesthetics and pleasure.

Service design was born for the economy of services and experiences: the need for multidisciplinary teams comes from the need to bring different kinds of expertise into the work, all coordinated by a service designer.

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The role of service design in healthcare

In medicine, inclusion and digital transformation have to move together: health organisations that want to improve the experience of patients have little choice but to invest in digital.

Health technology is also among the fastest-growing sectors in the world, which raises the stakes. Investment in software, hardware and artificial intelligence (AI) services is growing quickly, as is the study of services that help develop technical solutions and raise the sector’s digital maturity.

A strong push towards digital progress came from the pandemic: in healthcare it is therefore even more important to study service platforms that make people’s interactions easy, convenient and timely.

“Health technology is among the fastest-growing sectors in the world today.”

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Rules to follow when designing healthcare services

Designing a healthcare service is a complex process. It is a sector governed by extensive regulation, from government agencies to privacy, insurance and prescriptions, all of which call for different kinds of specialists in the design team.

Designing healthcare services can be compared to designing user experiences, but with important specificities. In healthcare, work usually concentrates on three elements:

• Processes;
• People;
• Tools.

Thinking about processes means thinking about the patient journey of someone who books an appointment or uses any service of the health system; people are the nurses, doctors or administrative staff who, in health facilities, have to talk both to the system and to the patient. Finally, the tools can be many kinds of thing: an app, a website, or other digital touchpoints.

The design principles are the same as those of user experience: they put the person at the centre and make the design of the service more inclusive. As we said when defining service design, the value of a method that includes different functional groups is precisely that it asks those groups to set their biases aside and to think in a systemic way.

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Digital medicine in 2022

Today, in their healthcare journey (the path of care), patients want a polished experience, comparable to that of e-commerce. At present, the user experience in healthcare is full of obstacles and difficulties. The burden of making the connections needed to follow a path through the touchpoints of the health system still falls entirely on them, which often leads people to give up on using the service.

The effort has to be to remove barriers to access and to reduce the burden of responsibility on the people at the end of the chain, so that they feel guided and looked after through handovers and transitions, such as specialist visits or appointments.

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Conclusions

A clear tendency is emerging in medicine, regardless of the type of product or service being designed. A good user experience is essential to the success of the service and to people’s satisfaction. At the same time, healthcare projects carry substantial responsibility, which is why, before the service itself, the focus should be on people.

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