Page History

Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR) Service Design Case Study

Objective

To develop a holistic view of program touchpoints, both online and offline, visible and invisible to the customer, in a service-oriented framework. These visuals will allow HQR stakeholders to:

• Better understand that our products as multifaceted services – enabling better outcomes for users and patients
• Ground the team in foundational understanding of the system and the main user journeys – enabling us to deliver faster
• Enhance a shared understanding as we learn more – through living documents

Problem

HQR stakeholders lacked a shared understanding of the comprehensive HQR customer experience, including digital and offline services. At times, this lack of context put decision makers at a disadvantage and led to siloed planning and prioritization of human-centered design and development work. 

Goals

Leverage human-centered design research methodologies to illustrate how the existing customer experience maps to HQR touchpoints by:

• Developing a service blueprint that focuses on the front-end components, the back-end components that support them, and the touchpoints between the two.
• Developing journey maps to illustrate the steps a user may take to interact with HQR, their goals, the challenges they face, and how they feel throughout the journey. Focus on three different product areas (Quality Improvement, Security & Access, Data Submissions).

Stakeholders

HQR Application Development Organization (ADO)

• Lesley Humphreys , HCD Lead with Bellese
• Mike Eng, Senior User Researcher with Ad Hoc
• Tyreek Houston , UX Researcher with Ad Hoc
• Fan Huang , UX Researcher with Ad Hoc

Interview Participants (titles and organization types only to respect anonymity)

• Quality Coordinator, Hospital
• Senior Director of Quality Data, Hospital System
• Quality Nurse Reviewer, Hospital
• Meaningful Use Project Manager, Hospital System
• Quality HQR Reporting, Hospital
• Quality Manager, Hospital System

HQR Community and Management

Approach

• Create service design templates & conversation guide: We determined the values and data points that we wanted to explore about the HQR system as a whole (service blueprint), and about our users’ journeys through topical product areas that cover the main tasks they seek to complete in the system (quality improvement, data submission, and secure access). We then developed conversation guides to reference in our conversations with HQR users.
• Interview end users: We conducted interviews with HQR end users and stakeholders (see “Stakeholders” section, above).
• Synthesize interview data into service design artifacts: We reviewed and tagged detailed notes from each interview to catalogue key insights about each product area. We then used the insights to populate the service design templates and create our service blueprint and journey maps.

Methodologies & Activities

• 7 interviews with hospital staff across the country
• Analysis of 3 years of existing HQR customer research
• Data aggregation from multiple studies, tagging for themes and notable information
• Synthesis of customer findings with existing system knowledge, especially for behind-the-scenes insights
• Leverage SAFe Agile framework for the development of service design artifacts
• Socialization with HQR stakeholders and the CCSQ HCD Community of Practice (recording)

Challenges

• Ideally we would have had access to additional stakeholders who are not end users of HQR (Quality Improvement executives, Information Technology staff at hospitals, etc.) but whose work is still directly impacted by how HQR functions.
• In a system as complex as HQR, it can be difficult to document all the sources and touchpoints for the data that flows into and out of the system.
• We’re always striving to keep these service design artifacts current and relevant for all ADO team members and stakeholders.

Results / Metrics

HQR is using these service design artifacts to prioritize roadmaps and create a shared understanding of the HQR customer experience.

What's Next?...

The HQR Human-Centered Design team is now

re-factoring its personas,

and building them into a dynamic research repository that is available to all stakeholders with Jira and Confluence access. The repository contains research insights that feed the product backlog, and these service design artifacts are used to further inform the work of the designers, analysts, and developers who create and build the Hospital Quality Reporting System.

The content of this case study was provided by Lesley Humphreys, HQR HCD Lead.