Designing the Healthcare Experience

I was recently asked to give examples of successful products resulting from unmet/underserved needs identified through customer insight research. A flippant answer would be, "just about anything not in the SkyMall catalog", but a more sensible answer was warranted! I pointed toward just about every car of recent years, Volvo being worthy of note for addressing female drivers (XC90); some of my own work with St Jude Medical, an Ethicon-Endo Surgery case study, and finally rounding out with examples by Intel, Marriott, and others.

Tangentially, I have spent many years citing the healthcare environment (particularly delivery rooms and equipment) as totally missing the mark around human emotional needs. In fact, I famously once gave a musical presentation (music elicits emotion) to a senior group at a leading device company on exactly this subject; leaving them staring at me in disturbing silence and disbelief. My point being, "You're missing one of the biggest unmet needs out there: peoples' feelings and fears". My senior colleague nearly fainted...

There have been some valiant attempts to address this by a few brand new hospitals and companies such as Philips, but the status quo is hard to change.

Until now it seems.

The Herman & Walter Samuelson Breast Care Center at Northwest Hospital is now running TV ads in the Baltimore region which beautifully capture the point and act upon unmet emotional/practical needs around breast care. In this simple example, a patient, sitting in a typical drab white-grey consulting room is clearly uncomfortable. She walks to a control on the wall and turns the ‘comfort dial’, transforming the room into something much more akin to her living room. Immediately we all find ourselves relaxing. Dawn Leonard, MD, FACS goes on to explain evening and weekend hours, tailored to suit patients who annoyingly still have to work for a living.

It's 2011 and this is just now going mainstream? Congratulations to Dawn and LifeBridge Health for listening to your patients and for giving me another example.

You can watch their ad here.