Strategy for health clinic
Optimizing a health clinic's resources using Design Thinking
The challenge
A local health clinic in Santiago, Chile needed to reduce data redundancies in their clinical system.
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What started out to be a data management problem, quickly grew into a broader operational challenge involving a complex system of stakeholders and decision-making.
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My role
Pro-bono consultant, Facilitator, Researcher, Designer, Design Thinking team mentor
Context
This 1-month project was a part of the IBM Service Corps program
Interviewing stakeholders
Our team of 3 IBM pro-bono consultants started by interviewing the clinic Directors to map out how healthcare workers and patients navigate the different systems of data collection and storage.
Stakeholder map
Re-scoping the problem and participatory design
As we interviewed the clinic staff and patients, we uncovered additional challenges such as data entry errors and hours of redundant manual tasks done to compensate for systems that did not talk to each other.
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Once we had articulated the challenges, I introduced our clients to Design Thinking methodologies in a half-day workshop.
Together, we came up with high-level concepts to tackle their data management problems and prioritized the ideas.
Interviewing employees and stakeholders
Design Thinking training and ideation workshop
An outcome that we did not plan for..
To our surprise, the Directors facilitated their own Design Thinking workshop the following week with their employees to tackle internal operational challenges.
They had just discovered and embraced a new approach to problem-solving!
Prioritization of concepts
Final deliverables and outcome
The clients were impressed with our final recommendations that showcased the impact of implementing a new connected data management system. It would allow for secure storage and transfer of clinical data and allow the clinic's data-entry staff to use their time better.
As a next step, this plan was to be shared with the Mayor to proceed with implementation in 3 of the commune's clinics.
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Despite the original problem scope being data management, our team of consultants ended up addressing Employee Experience, Patient Experience and also empowering the leadership with a versatile toolbox for critical thinking.
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Since we were limited in our capacity to affect actual change in the systems, with our deliverables we aimed to highlight the impact of reducing redundancies and blockers to better operationalize existing resources.
Final presentation to clients and stakeholders
As-is ecosystem map
Current representation of client's data ecosystem
To-be ecosystem map
Ideal version of client's data ecosystem
More about my learnings
Being immersed in an unfamiliar work-culture and communicating entirely via a language translator brought up a lot of opportunities for growth and learning non-design skills.
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This project has been an unparalleled experience in my career so far and I tried to capture it in real-time here so that I can continue learning from it: