Transforming Health Communication into Iterative User Experience Development

Background:  In the information age, we are constantly bombarded by messages from multiple channels.  To ensure the right message is sent through the right channel and is being received requires intimate knowledge and understanding of your target audience.  Superior audience experience requires superior cross-channel integration across the organization and throughout the communication development process. To understand the pressures on health organizations to communicate the right messages in a saturated market, they need to become more citizen-centric.  This era is the logical progression from the age of information as citizens are better informed and empowered through more access to information and to accessing alternatives than ever before.

Program background:  IBM was hired to radically change the patient experience for a medical organization.  The poster that will be displayed was a result of patient journey that mapped all one indiviaul's current and potential touch points with the organization.  Seeing the journey the citizen had with the organization helped the communication team to visualize the potential for improvements. This is an example of how IBM Interactive Experience Team was engaged with a health organization to help their management team envision improvements to the way they communicated and delivered services for all their citizens; so that they could ultimately deliver greater value in terms of the experience, improve user satisfaction, optimize cost to serve whilst maintaining quality of information.

Evaluation Methods and Results: 

The journey map looks at the experience from one individual’s perspective.  Several maps will help tell a story since experience differs for every individual.  Once you see all the touch points, the organization can begin to answer some of these questions and ultimately find better ways to communicate their messages.

• How do we ensure consistent citizen experience across all touch points
• How do we stay in front of citizen demands?
• How can we better leverage analytics to become more citizen-centric and deliver a premiere experience?
• What management, governance and organizational processes are impacted by a more significant shift to mobile and all other channels?
• How do we assess the success of our mobility and multichannel initiatives?
• Are we adopting the correct approach to message and communication development?
• How do we most effectively design and develop to meet multiple device and platform needs?
• What are current industry design and development standards?

Conclusions:  This health provider sought to transform their customer centric strategies, optimize cross-channel interactions, drive product and service innovation across digital initiatives, or streamline internal business processes, organizations can accomplish more by thinking about the individual first. In order to achieve true transformation, health organizations themselves need to function in a way that enables them to look at the citizen experience holistically.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Having a single view of the one citizen is just the start. The insight gained from that single view needs to permeate organizations from solution design to development to measurement, analysis and re-design. It needs to be incorporated into the evolution cycle and used to continually deliver improvements by adapting to user needs and preferences.