Today healthcare is looked at as a series of discrete events managed by different organisations or service providers. Hospitals are structured in silos, health-tech companies are creating products in pockets, insurance companies are worried about mortality and pharma companies are concerned only about the efficacy and safety of their products. These divisions into silos or innovations in pockets make sense to the hospital or a health-tech company or a pharma company but make no sense to the patient who sees and feels the entire service as one experience.

The concept of innovation in healthcare is often in the form of equipment, devices or medical technique. Recent research shows redesigning processes and practises to improve patient satisfaction can be positively associated with clinically successful outcomes and patient experience. Across the health care industry, companies need to organise their businesses around what the ‘humans’ in their customers need and feel. Healthcare is moving from a focus on physician-reported outcomes and volume-based care to overall well-being and the patient experience.

The value delivered by the product or service should be seen in totality, from learning about it, choosing and buying it, to using it. Service design creates easy, distinctive, and rewarding customer experiences that can unlock value by boosting loyalty, reducing dropouts and migration, and making companies stand out from their competition.

Service design is a user-centric approach that focuses on holistic service experiences. Methods like service blueprints, customer journeys and scenarios investigates the holistic experience and touchpoints. This involves not only designing the functionality, safety and reliability of the product or service, but the whole journey as it is experienced by the users including both tangible and intangible qualities.

Service Experience and Digital Transformation in healthcare and health-tech sectors should be tightly intertwined for better patient health outcomes, overall patient experience and wellbeing. Health-tech companies can’t hope to change their customer experience and generate better outcomes without transforming the way their business functions across the value chain. However, it is important to understand — when applying service design thinking — digital alone isn’t enough. Offline and online channels must be considered at every touchpoint.

The service Design approach combines ‘human-centred’ design, behavioural science and data analytics to identify deep insights that have the power to drive innovation across the healthcare ecosystem. Now more than ever, health-tech solutions need to be innovative that can change behaviours, improve outcomes and reduce costs. The first step in designing a seamless service experience is crafting an experience strategy. The focus then must be on the front-end and back-end processes integration and should be orchestrated to manage the entire healthcare journey.

Digital transformation, change management, and the careful design of touch-points in online and offline channels — all impact the customer/ patient experience. Only when these complex ecosystems are considered in their full context, centred on the humans they are meant to help, will lasting success be created.

(This Perspective was originally published on March 29, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)