Case Study: Co-designing a More Empathetic Emergency Department Experience Strategy
If you want to impact change FOR people, then you need to facilitate that change WITH people.
And that’s especially true in health care.
One of health care’s biggest challenges though, is that expertise and hierarchy - key tenants that have led to remarkable advancement through the years - often supersede the willingness of organizational leadership to engage robustly with multiple constituencies whose lived experiences and buy-in are essential to positive change.
When senior leadership from a prominent academic medical center engaged JW Collaborative to work with an emergency department facing significant, complex challenges, it became clear early on that what was initially presented as a strategic and operational challenge was actually a cultural, experiential, and, ultimately, a people problem:
Patients and families were having dramatically different experiences depending on their clinical needs.
Care team members were grappling with burnout, exacerbated by the pandemic.
The ED had evolved without cohesive design creating a confusing and inefficient layout, which impacted patient and family experience as well as care team operations.
The waiting areas were undersized and ill-equipped to alleviate patient anxiety.
And team members doubted the opportunity to address these problems given multiple, previous attempts.
Ultimately, we embarked on a 6-month strategic, human-centered co-design project with a cross-disciplinary team of leaders and care team members.
We collaboratively and directly engaged those most affected—patients, loved ones, and care team members— to uncover the real opportunities behind these problems as well as to give these key stakeholders a voice - a stake - in the process.
The result was a strategic framework highlighting human connection, empathetic care, a systems view of the entire health care system and campus, as well as a shared purpose in shaping what came next.
From there, we developed a signature experience playbook that introduced 3 platforms for change and prioritized corresponding conceptual features that made that change easier to visualize:
1️⃣ Personalize pathways and places - The invisible-to-patients clinical triage segmentation system should be supported by clearly delineated, visible-to-patients pathways, people, and places.
2️⃣ Re-imagine progress on the journey - When patients come to the ED they expect to feel better and to feel informed about what’s happening. Waiting will happen at multiple points, so make it more tolerable by emphasizing tangible, perceived, visualized, and well-communicated advancement throughout.
3️⃣ Provide all care in the right place - All care should be provided in the appropriate venue for the symptoms and circumstances. This system approach requires that resources and sup
Each platform was grounded in our collective understanding of the problem opportunity, service model recommendations, and a roadmap for implementation.
Perhaps, the most rewarding outcome was the buy-in, alignment, and cultural shifts with the ED team represented here by the medical director:
“Joel worked with our team to develop a patient and staff-centered approach. His work was outstanding, moving, and inspiring. We have implemented many of his observations with great success and are eager to continue refining our workflows.”
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Hi, I’m Joel Worthington, and I help service-oriented, intrapreneurial leaders harness the power of collaboration and subject matter expertise to elevate the value of cross-disciplinary teams and partners.
Email me at joel@jwcollaborative.com to connect about #collaboration #codesign #humancentereddesign #facilitation #coaching and #coachsulting
