Session 4: Healthcare as an identity, desirable traits for hiring in healthcare, building empathy with Medicaid members, and building trust with Medicare members
The title says it all - let's get into it.
Watch the full recording on Youtube and don’t forget to sign up for the next conversation taking place on July 6 at 1pm EST!
These sessions are hosted by Angela Liu, Head of Design at Flexpa. Flexpa is the easiest way for applications ranging from value-based care organizations, clinical trials groups, and insurance brokers to connect identified claims data. If that's even mildly interesting to you, then let's chat!
1. How integrated is healthcare into your identity as a designer?
We surprisingly haven’t had a question of this nature in the past before! Since it was an intimate group of attendees, we all went around and shared what got us into healthcare.
J-J from Unite Us noted that caring for people resonates with his design philosophy, even though Unite Us is more about social care than healthcare. His personal background includes family members deeply involved in healthcare, which has indirectly influenced his work.
Elena from Flatiron Health explained how she transitioned from humanitarian work to design to contribute to a mission-driven company. She recognizes the complexities within healthcare and how the necessity to make a profit influences the mission.
Richard from Unite Us stumbled into healthcare and found a passion for solving problems within the fragmented American healthcare system. His career has focused on advocating for design solutions within the constraints of technical feasibility, legal considerations, and stakeholder willingness.
Josephine from Redox was initially interested in becoming a healthcare practitioner but switched to public health and design after realizing she was uncomfortable with direct patient care. Her experiences with healthcare accessibility in the US and Taiwan fuel her passion to make the healthcare process less painful for patients.
I (Angela) also was surrounded by family members working in healthcare, from physicians to IT to public policy. I’m also drawn to the very perceptible impact on people’s lives through working in this field.
2. What are the important traits you look for when hiring for designers in healthcare?
I posed the question from the perspective of having designers who are empathetic, and perhaps more empathetic than other fields? At Flexpa we have a core valued called “Empathy Experts” where we have all team members strive to understand customer and end user needs and experiences. Our conversation challenged the idea that there is more empathy required in healthcare, and instead poses alternative traits that may be more important.
We discussed how while considering healthcare experience is a bonus, it is not essential. Instead, we should place more importance on empathy, teamwork, and fit with the company culture. On the note of empathy, that is inherent to all design, not specifically healthcare. The differentiation in the healthcare sector may be more about risk tolerance and potential for innovation due to industry constraints.
Too much emphasis on empathy can in fact be counterproductive as it may hinder decisive actions due to fears of adversely affecting a minority portion of the audience. As designers we know that you can never please 100% of the audience, so it is important to know when be decisive about the most generalizable design.
In response to a question on evaluating risk tolerance and adaptability during interviews, we discussed the importance of understanding how a candidate deals with constraints and prioritizes within them. One way to assess this is in a white-boarding challenge - how does the interviewee think about constraints? How do they work in and around them? Which ones are top of mind for them?
Lastly, given pre-existing mental models and industry standards, healthcare design may not be suitable for designers seeking to create new paradigms and conduct broad explorations.
3. What are ways to create empathy with the vast majority of healthcare patients who don’t have experiences like us who work in health tech?
In many ways, those with the opportunity to work in healthtech do not live representative lives of the majority of healthcare receivers - for example those on Medicaid.
One key theme that emerged is the value of direct user observation and research to develop empathy and a deep understanding of user needs. Listening to calls, participating in research sessions, and observing how people interact with designs in real time can provide invaluable insights into user behavior and preferences.
Tools like FullStory, can help in providing detailed analytics on user behavior. Especially in healthcare, concerns around PHI are important to acknowledge, and we discussed how FullStory allows masking data both by default and with customizations.
Another interesting discussion point was about the challenge of designing for multiple stakeholders with different needs and priorities. This brings into sharp focus the need to identify and prioritize the most vulnerable users in the design process.
The conversation also highlighted the role of personas in guiding design and development processes. While personas can sometimes be challenging to integrate into processes, we discussed how they can be incredibly valuable if they are based on actual user data and used consistently across teams. The Unite Us team mentioned that engineers at their organization have printed out personas and keep them next to their monitors as a constant reminder of who they are working for!
4. The population aging into Medicare continues to get more tech savvy, and wary of privacy and security.
With about 10,000 people per day aging into Medicare (turning 65), the stereotype of elderly people being unfamiliar or uncomfortable with technology is gradually becoming outdated. Many people in this age group were in the middle of their careers during the internet boom and are quite savvy with technology. However, there remains a certain degree of resistance or lack of trust towards technology, especially when it involves sharing health data with third-party applications. While it is sensible not to share personal data recklessly, this poses a challenge for healthcare technology solutions that require data to provide personalized care. Some topics we discussed around there were:
Trust building is a gradual process. An example was shared from a Medicaid home care matching platform, where the trust was built up over time, starting with convincing the first few users to growing via word-of-mouth recommendations. Another example was observed during the pandemic where patients who were initially hesitant to use telehealth services started using them out of necessity showing that over time, the need to solve problems can overpower resistance to new technologies.
There's a need to acknowledge that distrust in healthcare technology is a part of a broader distrust in technology in general. This is not a healthcare-specific issue but an issue with the tech industry as a whole.
From the e-commerce perspective, it was shared that users often felt safer completing transactions on sites with visual cues for security (like a padlock icon) or the presence of recognizable companies.
In the finance industry, people adopted technology when they saw its value—how it made their lives better or easier. This same approach can be used in healthcare.
The overall consensus is that building trust in healthcare technology is a complex issue and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. It will require ongoing efforts, changes in the industry's approach, and possibly regulatory interventions.
5. What do you think will be commonplace five to ten years from now in the healthcare technology sector that we're not thinking enough about at present?
This discussion was inspired by a Ted Talk which presented the notion of bioprinted organs as a future commonplace medical technology. A few ideas were thrown out:
AI as a central part of healthcare: AI's capability to analyze and manage vast quantities of data and information could reshape how healthcare is delivered.
Blockchain-based data control: There is hope that blockchain technology could enable patients to have granular access control over their own health data.
Remote monitoring technologies: This idea ties in with the changing views on privacy among younger generations who are generally more comfortable sharing their information. For instance, devices like iPhones already have features that allow users to share their locations with each other, and similar principles might be applied in a healthcare context.
We ended on the note that while these developments hold much promise, they should be pursued in a way that avoids dystopian outcomes and instead fosters a more utopian future. And with that, we say goodnight!
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