Digitalizing the Patient Journey

A Swiss hospital needed to streamline the treatment journey by improving internal processes and enhancing the overall patient experience. With the diminution of patient volumes due to late changes in insurances’ policy, the initiative of digitalizing workflows became urgent.

To kick start the effort, we delivered a first prototype of a Doctor Portal to assess concept validity, and an illustrated patient journey to explain the overall vision - all within two weeks.

Design challenges

Balancing speed and quality was critical to deliver both solutions. The prototype required precision in the set of features and interactions, to ensure a proper concept testing phase. The illustrated journey, on the other hand, required simplified, polished outputs to ease discussion with stakeholders.

Healthcare involves a complex network of stakeholders (patients, doctors, specialists, hospital staff, administrators, insurance providers), each group having unique workflows and priorities. Mapping out and simplifying these interactions into a cohesive, patient-focused journey required significant alignment and collaboration.

The health ecosystem relies on many systems different systems, often disconnected. Furthermore, GPs, specialists, hospital staff and secretaries are accustomed to those decades-old workflows and systems; proposing solutions that disrupted these habits too much risked reducing adoption.

Centralized and optimized forms to increase referrals’ flows

We designed new forms that allow external doctors to easily refer patients to the hospital by booking appointments online and request hospital rooms for patient interventions.

These forms were centralized in the doctor portal, enabling secretaries to track them via an internal tool, while still allowing doctors to track requests via email (confirmations, missing documents, etc.), in order to keep processes similar as existing ones to ensure adoption.

Ticketing system to reduce friction in secretaries’ workflows

In order to reduced administrative overhead and improved operational efficiency, we included a ticketing system to the Doctor Portal, dedicated to secretaries.

This system allows to track referrals, ask for missing documents, and modify appointments easily. The optimized form ensures all referral requests are valid and complete, reducing back-and-forth reducing back-and-forth communication with GPs.

Digitalized communication with patients

To improve patient experience and support administrative formalities, we reviewed communication channels. We mapped a set of notifications, reminders, online forms and surveys to be sent along treatment journey.

Reducing and anticipating administrative tasks, plus an on-purpose communication helps to reduce patient anxiety and enhances their overall experience.

Monitoring-oriented dashboard for internal doctors

To strengthen relationship with their doctors (that are still independent contractors), the hospital wanted to offer digital services aggregated into a platform. We designed a dedicated view of the Doctor portal for interns, providing a dashboard to monitor billing, training credits and referral flows.

Digitalized treatment journey to illustrate long term vision

In order to illustrate the vision and articulate the different initiatives, we mapped the envisioned patient journey in a narrative and simplified way. This journey was key to aligning stakeholders and driving consensus on the hospital’s digital transformation strategy.