Designing a Human-Centered Healthcare Contact Center

Design Opportunity

Apply design thinking and human-centered design to create a new operating model for an agency’s healthcare contact centers to better serve patients and facilitate collaboration.

Quick Facts

Skill Areas

Design Strategy
Design Research
Business Design
Design Mentorship

Background

A government agency with over 1000 contact centers facilitating access to care facilities lacked a centralized governance structure to guide operations and ensure sharing of best practices across the enterprise for high service quality regardless of location.

Output

Guiding design principles
Key business drivers and corresponding desired impacts
Operating model blueprint

The Details

Role & Activities

I led the research and human-centered design components of this design strategy and business design project, including:

Secondary research
Research synthesis
Research artifact creation
Workshop synthesis and deliverable creation

As the senior interaction designer on this project, I conducted secondary research and led our team of management consultants and a business designer in research synthesis and mentored a junior team member in the creation of user personas and visual artifacts for use in a design strategy workshop. I supported workshop, planning, facilitation, and synthesis, ultimately leading to the creation of an operating model framework to guide the transformation of contact center services and business processes.

Discovery

I led our team in a secondary research review of articles on industry best practices as well as previously conducted employee and patient experience research to identify the unmet needs of patients, providers, contact center employees, and organizational leadership.

Designing a New Operating Model

We facilitated a co-creative workshop using convergent and divergent thinking to lead stakeholders through imagining and prototyping new operating models. To set the stage for this work, we created a "research museum" and acted as museum concierges, explaining and answering questions about the research artifacts and personas. Image 1 shows the content we put together for one of the research artifacts so our visual designer could turn it into a poster.

The team used the workshop output and findings to build an operating model service blueprint that translates business strategy into a tangible end state with clear desired outcomes and business drivers: the inputs and activities that will lead to their desired outcomes (See Image 2 and Image 3 for visuals of the framework and drivers as they came together during synthesis). I presented our design process and the final model to senior client leadership.

Image 1: Laying out content for a research artifact to use during the workshop.

Image 2: Creating a framework for the final operating model by synthesizing the models that participants prototyped in the workshop.

Image 3: Synthesizing the workshop output into drivers and impacts the operating model will enable.

Impact & Results

We delivered the operating model along with guiding principles and business drivers to validate operational change decisions against (See Image 4). Immediately following the initial work, the client requested a second workshop and ultimately elected to exercise their option year so that we could begin planning four additional workshops, including one to imagine the future of virtual healthcare.

Image 4: The final operating model blueprint (image is blurred for confidentiality)