Improving the quality and efficiency of public healthcare in Goa
CLIENT: ScaleFactor Social Labs
THE BRIEF
Identifying opportunities in the space of healthcare in Goa and designing solutions for the same using relevant design tools and methods.
OPPORTUNITY
The Goa Medical College and hospital (GMC) is a major touchpoint and is responsible for the perception formed by care receivers in their public healthcare journey. While the actual medical treatment at GMC is of good quality, it’s the allied services that upset the patients.
SOLUTION
A system design for GMC having various touch-points in the patient journey finally resulting in a better experience.
+ Design for healthcare in India must be - Affordable, available and accessible.
+ Notable interventions to achieve this that are currently used are frugality, task shifting, hub and spoke model, Public Private Partnership.
For wicked problems like healthcare it was imperative to use systems thinking, a holistic approach to problem solving that emphasises contextual understanding.
We used the double diamond approach - zoomed out lens to understand the landscape- environmental scanning, stakeholder mapping and analysis, expert opinions, current scenario and trends of healthcare in India, it’s shortcomings and strengths.
Converged back in to form our hypothesis and perceived problem areas and went on field to better understand all stakeholders and uncover new problems, validate perceived problems and form a specific problem statement.
Stage 1: Landscaping and research:
Zoomed out lens to understand the healthcare landscape and the problem area by conduct secondary research in the form of environmental scanning, stakeholder mapping and analysis, expert opinions, understanding current scenario and trends of healthcare in India, it’s shortcomings and strengths, studying other interconnects like lifestyle and education and then conducting primary research
Stage 2: Sensemaking:
Zoomed into unstructured research findings were made sense of by understanding jobs, pains gains of stakeholders, using journey maps and empathy maps to understand gaps, and turning observations into inferences and further into insights. These insights helped define the specific problem statement.
Stage 3: Ideation and Evaluation:
Design criteria and constraints laid out and with a zoomed out lens looked at ways in which we would solve the problem and evaluated the solutions against each other
Stage 4: Service design:
The final concept was defined in a service design blueprint to identify ways in which the back end needs to be designed to deliver what the front end and customer needs demand.
Solution
The final concept is a system design having various touchpoints in the patient journey finally resulting in a better experience. Every touchpoint in itself is a pain reliever or a gain creator and works in sync with the other touchpoints and is a part of the entire system. The challenge was to improve patient experience at different touchpoints with different kinds of problem solving tools and also make sure all the touchpoints are inter-related and work in unison with each other for an overall smooth functioning larger system.