06 Aug 2007 0951H

Is healthcare the great untapped user experience market?

When you look at America’s burgeoning healthcare system and all its overhead it’s difficult to argue for more staff and yet even more levels of bureaucracy for the average seeker of healthcare services to wade through. But it is because the system is so complex and convoluted that it is even more necessary to have a C-level executive for user experience, as we’ve seen appointed at the Cleveland Clinic. It’s not difficult to understand how badly things are going in the US. Look at the growing numbers of elderly, the numbers of overworked staff and errors committed, the ways that triage operates in emergency services, the follow up with the insured and the uninsured. Even the very intake of patients in the emergency room. As a least-case example, at a visit about a year ago at a local suburban hospital, there were no less than two signs saying “triage,” in different weights and typefaces hanging above a cubicle obscured partly from public view. But how many incoming patients would know what that word means? Are there other ways to identify and make the various user touchpoints and goals for the staff and patients easier to work through, so the staff can reduce errors, and so that patients can seek the help they really need? And those ways will require interfaces, all the myriad means by which people are informed by, make sense of, and act upon the world. It seems we have a long way to go, however, before we can be considered to be doing a good job.

On Sunday mornings, after NPR Weekend Edition winds down, I listen to the CBC’s “White Coat, Black Art,” a documentary series on the Canadian healthcare system and how doctors and patients navigate its own top-heavy system, and which I think is one of the best, regularly broadcasted programs on the medical care experience on the air. This weekend, I heard something that will sound strikingly familiar to UXers, which is looking to aviation best practices to reduce medical errors, from which 24,000 Canadians die every year. Give it a listen.

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2 responses to "Is healthcare the great untapped user experience market?"

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10 Aug 2007 0739H

Brian Lunde writes:

Thanks for pointing me to the Cleveland Clinic Announcement. I should have caught your blog post before I wrote mine, referencing a WSJ article about the use of patient and family advisory boards in hospitals!.

I agree with you that healthcare is ripe with opportunity for customer experience management. And here’s another one: automobile dealerships.

10 Aug 2007 1424H

Gino writes:

Oh, precisely. Isn’t that the whole reason why Carmax is so successful? No haggling, just agree and go? Never mind the after purchase care.

The way I hear it, buying and servicing a car in America from a dealership is almost as close as you can go toe-to-toe with a shark without getting into the water. Sad, but, the way that the system is incentivized and structured now, the likelihood there will ever be a user experience officer for a car company is small to none. Which makes it even more sad because if ever Detroit was dedicated to winning, they should make it a corporate initiative.

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