The key things you must do (and not do) when using digital to support integrated healthcare

Hi everyone, it’s Daniel here with this week’s newsletter and an update from the Healthcare team at Livework Studio.

Today, we wanted to tell you about the learnings we’ve gained from recent work with the Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust on using digital to support care, and what it?really means to take a patient-centric approach.

If you're interested in a more detailed and extensive view of our work with them, we’ve packaged it all up for you in our latest report called the ‘Livework NHS Status Report’ about how to use service design to support patients and staff in the NHS.

Enjoy this week's read!

Click on the image below to download the full report.

Our Top 10 Learnings for a patient-centric approach

Our learnings from recent projects we’ve completed for the NHS have all been compiled into a series of articles and discussed in our recent webinar on the subject. Here are our top 10 findings:

1) Don’t repeat the same mistakes: the problems people face currently aren’t solved purely by making something digital.

2) Use the opportunity: properly harness the needs of patients and staff to innovate and really improve their experience.

3) Interrogate the current care pathways: rethink the way they’re set up, and see this as an opportunity to do things differently.

4) Talk properly to staff and patients: take the time to understand the perspectives of staff and patients.?

5) Get the basics right: every staff member we spoke to wants the basic features of a system to be “done well”.

6) Make life easier for staff: things like creating auto-population functionality and reducing excessive pop-ups, can really help in a busy environment like a hospital.

7) Be transparent and honest with staff: be prepared to be open and to speak truthfully about their experiences.

8) Find ways to engage and collaborate: involve the staff and patients throughout the whole process.?

9) Improve the usability of systems: make information clear and accessible, so staff can easily find up-to-date information. This could be contact details, policies, or even IT help.

10) Integrate data, in real-time: bringing data together from different systems (even from external systems) in a timely manner helps staff to plan and predict patient flows.

Doing all of these things properly means you’ll end up building systems that will actually work for the people using them, and which will lead to better outcomes for patients, staff, and the NHS.

"It’s all about aligning healthcare with service design principles." - Daniel Letts

Where can you find more?

You can access our full report here. We hope you find it useful and insightful!?

If you’d like to discuss how you can use service design to improve your services and your particular situation, we would love to talk to you!

Book a free one-hour consultation with the healthcare team by emailing me at [email protected].

Next week...

We’ll dive into the topic of “Transforming Through Service Orientation” based on the webinar this Thursday. We’ll be sharing some of the key thoughts discussed around how as a strategic decision-maker you can overcome organisational challenges by using service orientation tools. Looking forward to having you next week!

What's going on at Livework Studio?

• Panel Discussion: Transformation through service orientation.?Thursday, 23 March 2023 at 12:00 pm, Eastern Time on Zoom. If you're a design leader currently helping your organization transform and scale with the customer at its heart, you might be interested in this one!?Register?here?as we discuss the biggest challenges on this journey. Click?here?to?learn more.

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See you next week!

About Livework

Good services don’t happen by accident. They need to be designed. That’s what we do.

Livework?was the first service design consultancy. Over the last 21 years, we have used design to solve business challenges on more than?1500?projects and programmes.

We’ve been around the block when it comes to navigating and delivering change. In addition to improving and innovating in customer experience, we help organisations transition to becoming the customer-centric and sustainable organisations they aspire to be. Find out more on?www.liveworkstudio.com?or drop us a line at [email protected].