If you're leading a complex organisation in the Healthcare sector, you’re probably on the journey to a more patient-centric and digital offering. Healthcare, fundamentally, is all about people. On the clinician side there hasn't been a lot of innovation in terms of talking to them directly and asking what it is we can do to make their lives and jobs better. Follow along a Design Thinking journey with our partners Care Fertility, and we'll show you how to take steps in that journey yourself.
Care Fertility is one of the biggest private providers of IVF, or fertility treatment, in the UK. It's highly skilled, highly technical, highly responsible procedures that we do within the laboratory. Our priority is always the patients. So, we have multiple procedures that are time critical.
And we always want to make sure that we're doing them at the right time so that the patient gets the optimum treatment. Because we're dealing with humans, it doesn't always go to plan, and we need ways of thinking on our feet and moving things around. The problem is to manage the team and the skill mix of the team with the clinical workload for the day. We do this very manually at the moment.
It takes a lot of time and effort to do it, we don't have a high level view of it. In any given day you could have maybe seven different pieces of software to look at, and two or three different paper-based based systems to look at. So, our need to remember where all of these different elements are and what each one holds takes a lot of mental energy. Once have pinpointed the most valuable space for innovation, we take this into our Design Thinking framework.
This will include persona development, where we look at the attitudes, behaviours and needs of the audiences that we're appealing to. We run empathy mapping so we can understand how people feel through each stage in a journey. We use these inputs to frame our ideation sessions, where we come up with solutions and ideas with the people that know the space the best. We then prototype the idea and test it with real users.
This gives us confidence in the solution and empowers us to move it forward. The output is a dynamic scheduling tool that allows embryologists to respond to clashes in their day-to-day that may impact their clinical work. It also supports learning and development of training staff in order to get enough exposure to lab work to qualify. there's a digital board in the lab that shows progress throughout the day, flags issues, and offers positive reinforcement for all the wins, big or small.
Particularly the training stuff looks absolutely ace. When you can just see there where it's like ‘They've only done this two times this week’ Awesome, really good. We all came with different ideas or different interpretations, and actually once you do distil it down, the key issues are all very, very similar and you quite quickly come up with solutions to things that you didn't think it was in there. If you just got asked the question at the beginning, you wouldn’t have that level of detail at all.
The process itself sort of picks all that out for you, so yeah, it’s great.
