1) Can you explain what service design is? And how your company implements it / uses that field?

Understanding, improving, and sustaining positive service interactions between the organization and the user are core concepts in service design thinking. But before there was service design, there was experience. Focusing on an economy derived largely from goods and services fails to explore the holistic environment in which a product will live. Refining institutional goals, widening the scope of the patient experience across channels, and bringing a heightened awareness of the patient-focused experience has led IC/Health’s strategic vision to the doorstep of service design.

This is not a surprising convergence, and it can be traced back to our origins in digital strategy and user experience. An experience isn’t only how patients, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders click through a website. Experience implies something about the wider time, place, and context in which an interaction occurs. To understand and design the best possible experiences for patients, IC/Health takes a hard look at the very culture of interactions to understand what patients and stakeholders truly care about. 

 2) What do you believe is the greatest opportunity for your company using service design? 

To bring long-term success to our clients, we are constantly seeking opportunities to gather user and stakeholder feedback, design for maintenance and sustainability, and determine a product/service’s role within the larger system. Weaving journey maps into larger organizational priorities and solid change management processes are necessary to produce true improvements in how services—and an exceptional patient experience—are delivered. 

3) Can you share three tips for implementing service design in their own practice? 

1. Journey maps and other service design tools aren’t the end of the design process—they’re the beginning. A well-executed patient journey is integrated into larger organization operations, given a chance to mature through iterative feedback cycles, and drives ongoing enhancements to service delivery.

2. After opportunities and needs are identified, the experience should be dimensionalized in negotiated within context and space. Looking to analogous domains for inspiration and playing the role of a specific user, are just a couple ways to generate solutions. From this, prototypes and experiments can be formed leading to real-world data gathering.  

 3. Service design isn’t simply about identifying problems, but about finding the keys to behavior change. Introducing a new culture and reorganizing the structures of a service requires engagement, empathy, and interest from all sides and this cannot solely be accomplished from a boardroom or a workshop.