Texas Health Resources
Texas Health is one of the largest faith-based, non-profit health systems in the U.S., with over 350 points of access, 24,000 employees, and 6,000 physicians. I worked as an extension of their product team for 2 years, functioning primarily in design research, strategy, and conceptualization.
Initiatives included:
Pre-Admission Testing: How can Texas Health improve consumers' pre- and post-surgical experience by reducing their concerns, and eliminating multiple trips for PAT?
Nurse Manager Experience: How can Texas Health enable and empower the Nurse Manager role through re-imagined services, touch-points, and products?
Connected Health: How can we create a connected ecosystem of different providers, resources, and communities, so that patients can directly maintain and improve their health?
Neuroscience Service Line: What are the key challenges patients & providers face when diagnosing & identifying a treatment path in the Neuroscience service line?
Referral Navigation: What's causing the referrals experience to break down, and how can we create a process that enables transparency & proactive communication between PCPs, Navigators, Specialists, and Patients?
Caregiver Experience: How can Texas Health better support caregivers?
Telehealth: What telehealth platform should Texas Health use, and how can it best be integrated?
Discharge & Visitation: How can discharge communication be improved, both in-hospital and post-discharge?
Sample Case Study:
Easing The Burden Of Nurse Managers
Opportunity:
How can Texas Health enable and empower the Nurse Manager role through re-imagined services, touch-points, and products?
Research Activities:
9 Executive Leadership Interviews from HR, Finance, Nursing, Experience, and Data & Analytics
10 Nurse Manager Interviews from 8 different TH facilities, varying in staff sizes and experience level
5 Journaling Participants who documented daily routines through the Indeemo platform
9 Workshop Participants who collaboratively iterated on design concepts & solutions
I also conducted secondary research through a literature review, comparative analysis, and competitive analysis to understand the emerging non-traditional competitors (e.g. virtual health players) as well as to gain inspiration from analogous industries and tools.
What We Learned:
Simplify the Routine
Nurse Managers are daily overloaded with both planned and ad hoc tasks. Because of the disparate nature of their tools & resources, it can be difficult to prioritize and manage these tasks.
“It’s death by 5,000 paper cuts.”
Connect People, Processes, & Learning
Nurse Managers can often feel isolated from their peers, unsupported in their tools and training, and disconnected from the "why" of corporate initiatives.
“We’ll take a person who’s great at being a clinician, then tell them to be a great manager, without the training.”
Balance Corp. Vs. Care Communication
Nurse Managers can spend much of their time filtering, synthesizing, and repeating corporate communications to their staff, which takes time away from communications about patients.
“Not everyone will check email, so I’ve had to get creative- like an interactive exercise in the breakroom with sticky notes & crayons.”
A Day In The Life:
Reality Of Responsibilities:
Concept Exploration
Actionable Aggregation
Connect and aggregate tools, platforms, and information, so that Nurse Managers can have clarity about what to prioritize, how to act, and where to go for daily tasks. Enable Nurse Managers to take meaningful and timely action by converting multiple inputs into only a few outputs.
Tactics include:
Daily Dashboard
Virtual Assistant
Resource Center
Collaborative Leadership
Connect Nurse Managers to the TH system and the larger manager community. Create a 2-way connection between Nurse Managers and corporate leadership, empowering them to influence system-wide change. Enable Nurse Managers to both self-learn as well as learn from each other.
Tactics include:
Social Platform
Personal Trainer
In-Person Connections
Focused Communication
Streamline and standardize communication, in both the receipt of the information as well as the dissemination of information. Remove the Nurse Manager as the bottleneck & middleman of communication, so that they can focus more on care communications instead of corporate.
Tactics include:
Virtual Bulletin Board
Smart Synthesis
Concept Testing
In a concept collaboration session, we tested our concepts with 9 nurse managers, and collaboratively iterated off of the most-loved concepts.
The concepts that resonated most with nurse managers were the virtual bulletin board, the command center, the resource center, the personal trainer, and a nurse manager summit. Through activities and discussion, we fine tuned each concept, then presented them to executive leadership to prioritize and budget.
"It's amazing to see how you translated our problems into solutions. We can tell you actually listened to us, and we know we're moving in the right direction."
Want to know more?
Please contact me for a more detailed readout of my research process and the concept features.
Thank you for reading!