Designing ACCESS Healthcare

Instructor

Judith Gregory

Linda Pulik

About ACCESS™: ACCESS Community Health is a non-profit, mission-driven organization that provides comprehensive ambulatory care health services to the medically underserved and uninsured through the Chicago metropolitan region. ACCESS is the largest network of community health centers in the nation, operating 50+ health centers serving over 200,000 individuals through 800,000 medical visits annually. One-fourth of ACCESS™ patients have no health insurance, paying on a sliding-fee-scale. Refer to www.accesscommunityhealth.net to appreciate how this on-going IPRO team can make a difference to the people of Chicago.

ACCESS and IIT have established a partnership that can address a variety of organizational needs over time. The focus will always be on creating user-centered design solutions that serve ACCESS™ mission of providing quality health care to all, regardless of health status or ability to pay. Since 2004, a series of IPRO teams has focused on research, develop and demonstration of new information system designs and improvements for several different patient service programs at ACCESS. This has included information systems for managing prenatal care and immunization and referrals to hospitals. During Fall 2007 and Spring 2008, IPRO teams addressed new site design and environment of care improvements opportunities for ACCESS. The Spring 2009 IPRO builds on the 2007-2008 workshop results, with a focus on Patient Experience: ACCESS Community Health Clinics of the Future.

This workshop will be geared towards giving you practical human-centered research and design experience by focusing on:
1. How to design effective user-centered research to understand the quality of patient experience and clinic staff experience which results in insights that are actionable from a design perspective for your client, ACCESS Community Health.
2. How to design products, services and communication for community health service providers based on a thorough understanding of patient experience, health service provider and management perspectives.
3. How to contribute from the basis of qualitative experience-based research to ACCESS Community Health leaders' design of its quantitative survey instruments and metrics for achieving excellence for ACCESS Community Health clients.

During the course of this Spring 2009/Fall 2009 workshop you will implement the formative stages of a user-centered design process by developing and prototyping design concepts for one of three ACCESS Community Health Centers. In other words, students in the workshop will work in three multidisciplinary teams with each team responsible for one of three clinics selected by ACCESS Community Health. You will also engage with ACCESS Community Health managers in analysis of the quantitative research instrument implemented over the last eight years and the resulting body of data, in order to consider its potential re-design for collecting more actionable feedback to the clinics, by comparison with the qualitative approach taught in this IPRO course.

By working on this project, you will have the opportunity to interact with administrators from ACCESS in a professional capacity and you will gain proficiency in human-centered research and design methods.

Methods

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Learning Objectives
At the end of this experience, you will have:

1. a solid understanding of user-centered methods necessary to conduct design research in a health care environment
2. a basic understanding of the patient experience and the role of service providers and how design can help address these
3. familiarity with metrics for quality of patient experience and healthcare service delivery
4. an idea of the difference and relationships between qualitative and quantitative research, and how these are most appropriately used
5. a portfolio-ready project completed for a recognizable client

Format & Grading

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Format
Class each week will generally consist of:
1. a brief discussion of the previous week's assignment
2. regular student presentations outlining project progress (see schedule below)
3. a guest speaker or short presentation given by faculty
4. working sessions for project teams

Schedule
This workshop will be divided into the following main work phases:
1. Preliminary brainstorming based on analysis of the existing quantitative data (2 weeks)
2. Field research planning, execution in clinics & analysis (5 weeks)
3. Concept development and design refinement (3 weeks)
4. Prototype testing & analysis (3 weeks)
5. Presentation of results to the client for feedback & final refinement (2 weeks)