Empowering Inpatients: Streamlining Visitor Management with Biometric Solutions
Project Type
B2B discovery engagement to demonstrate how our solution fits into the existing experience and saves staff hours of tedious tasks.
Role and Contribution
UX Designer responsible for conducting user research to produce artifacts depicting the solution.
Methods
Persona Profiling
Journey Mapping
Ideation Workshop
Service Blueprint
Storyboarding
Background
During a discovery engagement with a regional healthcare group overseeing multiple hospitals, we identified opportunities to leverage NEC’s biometric recognition solutions to enhance the patient experience while delivering measurable business value.
Opportunity Scope
We focused on empowering inpatients to manage their visitors, reducing the workload on receptionist nurses by automating tedious check-in tasks.
What is an Inpatient?
An inpatient is a patient admitted to a hospital for an overnight stay or longer. Our focus was on inpatients with non-critical conditions expected to stay for less than a week, such as expecting mothers or patients with minor injuries.
Understanding Today’s Reality Through Research
I interviewed inpatients, receptionist nurses, and visitors to understand their needs and frustrations with the current visitor management process. To illustrate each persona and the dynamics of the visitor management process, I created a the persona profiles below and current-state diagram showing the back-and-forth interactions during visitor
Profile of each persona involved in visitor management for inpatients.
This diagram shows the actions each persona performs during a visitation.
Tedious the visitor check-in task:
Visitor arrives at front-desk.
Receptionist Nurse stops performing their admin tasks
Context switches to start the check-in steps.
Asks for identification
Asks for relation to the patient.
Contacts the patient to confirm visitation.
Authorizes visitation.
Nurses reported spending up to 15 minutes checking in each visitor, and with an average of 30 visitors per day, this adds up to 7.5 hours daily, significantly reducing the time available for critical administrative tasks.
Problem Statement:
How might we empower patients to manage their visitors so that receptionist nurses are freed up to perform critical administrative tasks?
Ideating a New Experience
Participants placed their ideas and sticky notes were used to share feedback.
With a clear understanding of each persona involved and their roles, I facilitated an ideation session with my business development partners and healthcare subject matter experts. We began by presenting the personas, the current workflow, and the defined problem statement.
After reviewing NEC’s visitor management system, each participant was given blank paper to sketch a step-by-step workflow of how they envisioned the existing solution addressing the problem statement.
Each participant presented their ideas, and the group provided feedback on what worked, what didn’t, and what could be improved. By the end of the session, we had a unified representation of the experience that best met user needs.
Visualizing the New Experience
The Service Blueprint demonstrated how the solution integrated into the existing workflow. More importantly, it highlighted how the tedious visitor check-in steps could be eliminated.
Value Realization
As the solution meets user needs, it unlocked a chain of benefits. This was visualized through a tree diagram that showed how the solution created a win-win scenario for users, the healthcare group, and NEC.
Telling the Idea Story
Although the solution significantly reduced the effort required to check in visitors, it didn’t completely eliminate all tasks. Receptionist nurses still needed to provide patient room locations, directions, and occasionally explain how to use the check-in tablet kiosk. However, by proving that the core solution delivered key benefits, these additional details could be addressed in future iterations.
This storyboard shows how a visitor is invited and security checks-in with minimal staff effort.
Conclusion
Once we demonstrated how the solution would empower patients to manage their visitors and save nurse staff hours of tedious administrative tasks. I designed the UI for the proof of concept.