patient experience

Agency: Frog Design
Role: Senior Service Designer

A newly minted Innovation Department at UCLA was eager to get us working on the first segment of their challenge: redefining the relationship with their patients. There has always been a tenuous relationship between hospital and patient, whether it is a lack of understanding, lack of communication or lack of service and follow through. Hospitals and doctors seem to do all they can to hold it at bay and everyone is running around while seemingly doing everything they can for the patients. So why aren't patients happy?  

We were tasked to develop a patient focused journey for seeking out bhp treatment and care within the UCLA system 

A research team I co-led from Frog headed out to LA to find out. We geared up with our videocams, microphones and excel sheets to start asking questions, taking notes and delving into understanding what the missing cues were. We stood in on 2 in-patient consults, 3 clinic observations, met with 7 patients sharing similar ecosystems, 12 expert interviews: doctors, residents, nurses and medical leads at UCLA. Through our methodology: contextual inquiry process, a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection, loads of sticky notes and lots of sketching, we wound up with a number of hypothesized opportunities.

Who better to really come up with ideas, but the people who worked in the field day in and day out. 

While mapping it all out we met with and facilitated a group "think" where we strategized through different opportunities with our local experts. Who better to really come up with ideas, but the people who worked in the field day in and day out. The real challenge was putting them in the position to look at this problem from different angles. By the end of the day we had a tremendous effort from the team and were really excited with the depth and breadth of opportunities we came up with. We presented our findings and the evolved opportunity areas that UCLA could move forward with in bite sized pieces. Some were small but meaningful to the patient. Others were large and unwieldy, but were fundamental in moving forward.

The project changed how I view the care I deliver on a routine basis. Our Department discovered a spectrum of actions we could take to enhance the value of care we deliver to our patients. It all started with asking them about their care.   

          - Christopher Saigal MD, MPH

The Innovation group at UCLA was delighted and was excited to move forward with a roadmap in which to highlight their needs. They looked at it as an investment for in depth research from an external agency that would be solid support for the changes they would suggest in the future. 

One example from the UCLA Newsroom Article tells of an initiative that has paid off with net revenues of more than $800,000 per month is a UCLA elective surgery discharge program that has made the patient discharge process much more efficient and gets patients being discharged by their doctors out of the hospital faster and with a better understanding of how to take their post-surgery medication, said Dr. Michael Yeh, associate professor of surgery at UCLA.

Another case study that was inspired by our work and since piloted and implemented is CI-CARE.  Dr. Feinberg with UCLA tells more: The one most in my heart today is CI-CARE, our best example of innovation. CI-CARE is our customer service pneumonic about how you introduce yourself when you go into an inpatient room. It came from a nurse manager in a particular unit. It's our best example of an idea that gets brought in [as an innovation] and now we all live by it.

CI-CARE started around connecting with patients and introducing ourselves. Call them by Mr., Mrs. or Ms. and their last name. Ask them before you do anything for them. Respond to any questions they have and, when you exit, tell them what's coming next. Now CI-CARE [has become] the umbrella for everything we do that is patient-centered. It's morphed into everything we do at UCLA — how we answer the phone, how a security guard will walk you to your car, how we treat each other. 

We've undertaken major innovations that are actually harmful to our bottom line, under the old business model for Healthcare. our purpose is to heal humankind. we do that by alleviating suffering, promoting health and delivering acts of kindness. That's what we measure things against. If we take care of people – and I want them cared for like they're my mom – i don't want them in the hospital if they don't need to be.  Read Entire Article Here.

Keep up with UCLA Innovation information by visiting their site, read Innovation for Impact,  Patient Voice article, Patient Voice Toolkit (derived from our team's core methodology), a video of new innovative achievements, and a great article from UCLA Newsroom: Health innovations pay off in cost savings, better patient care.