Good Medical Practice
What do Senior Doctors need to sustain good medical practice?
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Title: Sustaining good medical practice for Senior Doctors
Type of work: Strategic service design
Duration: 8 weeks
Date: March 2023
Due to the sensitivity of commercial in confidence content, I won't be able to share much of the findings and deliverables, but I can tell an interesting story comprised of the broad discoveries, the journey we took, and the lessons we learned along the way.
Our client was a medical indemnity insurance provider who wanted to better understand their customers to inform strategic decision making, and assist Senior Doctors in the private industry with good medical practice.
PROJECT GOALS
Understand unmet needs of Senior Doctors to deliver better medical practice and medical practitioners
Identify opportunities that extends client's value proposition and support member growth.
Develop concepts to demonstrate how the client might create value within opportunity areas.
Approach
Conduct exploratory research to form insights
Develop the gathered insights into themes
Ideate concepts around each theme in co design workshops
Synthesise concepts for user testing and feedback to obtain confidence around desirability and impact
Looking back, it looked like a mash up of the double diamond and speculative design:
Conduct exploratory research to form insights → Scan for signals
Develop the gathered insights into themes → Evaluate scenarios
Ideate concepts around each theme in co design workshops → Diegetic prototyping
Synthesise concepts for user testing and feedback to obtain confidence around desirability and impact → Locating the preferred futures
Research Scope
Broadly Interesting Findings
We should all care about what is happening in our healthcare system
A wicked problem exists: GPs are feeling the pressure in a healthcare system that is failing to provide adequate support to the glue which holds together primary care.
Doctors need a level of support which isn't always there and there is a lot of noise in the space that can contribute to poor career satisfaction and burn-out.
Doctors generally enter the profession under altruistic drivers. This drive often leads to the neglect of their own self care which can increase the risk to their medical practice without them noticing until it's too late.
COMMUNICATING TO THE CLIENT IN A LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND
Using visual models helped the client empathise with their customers:
Tensions: There are key priorities for doctors which are constantly in tension. How can we help to balance them?
Pyramids: What supports a doctors practice and help them achieve what they are striving for?
Spectrums: High level archetypes - The motivations for becoming a GP and a Surgeon are very different.
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOPS
Through co-design workshops, we harnessed the client's domain knowledge using divergent design thinking to assist in the generation of ideas and concepts which we took to testing. The process also helped us demonstrate the value of the work we do and assisted with the client's need for internal stakeholder engagement.
NARROWING DOWN THE OPPORTUNITIES
1. Developing the gathered insights into themes
2. Prioritising the identified opportunities with client
3. Forming areas of opportunity to test whilst ensuring the right level of thinking and depth for testing.
4. Concept testing of ideas representative of the opportunity area to validate and gain certainty in direction.
5. Supporting the client in the decision making process.
OUTCOMES
Through our approach, we were able to help the client narrow in on a set most probable and impactful opportunities to assist in their strategic business decision. We left the door open for future work to gain greater confidence of the concepts through further design and iteration.
LESSONS LEARNED
For the project retrospective, I consolidated our project learning for the broader CEC team:
