Assignment - Learning Launch

1. Challenge

Together with my team, consisting of customers representatives and our consultants and service  designers, we are working on creating a new concept for healthcare services that could be offered to  companies in Finland. (occupational healthcare service)

Our client is a large insurance company that also provides healthcare services. The business case for the  digitalized and mobile healthcare services, relies on using as much digital services as possible. We can  see from the numbers that if we can move a great portion of the non-urgent face to face meetings with  healthcare professionals into a mobile and/or digital service, the more customers we can serve (with a  fraction of the cost) and focus the possible left-over time of doctors and healthcare specialists on the more  complex medical cases that requires face to face meetings with a doctor. This would also help to improve  the quality and variety of the total healthcare service that could be provided to a company.

This is nothing new anymore, but we want to create a service that really creates value for the end-user  and the company that provides the occupational healthcare.

In the first phase we are focusing on the end-user digitalized services.

These mobile digital services includes:

•  self-evaluation based on questions and health data

•  chat services that are partly chat-bot-based, partly conducted by healthcare professionals

•  online/video meeting with healthcare professionals

•  medical records

The challenge we are addressing is to gather enough customer insight about these digital services so  we can focus on developing those that really matters (if any at all) and also find specific ways of  creating these services so that they will be the best on the market. In other words – where should we  focus our development resources and funds on to create most value for the end-users.

2. Selection

We had already conducted several service design steps (visualization, story telling, defining  hypothesis, tested some hypothesis with customers in interviews, reframed the hypothesis and some  mind-mapping) in the project and had gathered enough information for learning launches. Now we  wanted to test what the end-users really think of the service and test the hypothesis. By this we  excepted to get deeper information of the buy ins of the service, what really matters in the service,  what else we could offer, what kind of information is key to have in the service and how the  informations should be presented, tone of voice etc.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did and

how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

Together with our service designers we first made some sketches of the digital services and  conducted some customers tests and test interviews. We wanted to see how the end-users react to  the service, what kind of choices they would make if they would use a digital service for a medical  issue instead of calling a doctor or book an appointment. This gave us some more information about  our hypotheses and helped us delineate key assumptions into a first demo version. We used the tool

Invision to quickly demonstrate the service flow with pictures in a click-through demo. This further  gave us information on which services we should concentrate on and which services and ideas we  might put aside. Then we did some more tests and filmed the reactions customers had when they  made some choices in the service and focused on those moments we saw some hesitation. We  further interviewed the test persons (end-users) and asked why and what made them to do the  choices, what was difficult, what was or wasn’t relevant info and so on. With three rotations, we  started to get a frame for the first real release of the digital service.

Finally, we chose a customer (company) with which we conducted a real-life test of a chat based  service for the first contact when they needed the help of a healthcare professional for example in the  case of flue and possible lab-tests. This first real learning launch has just started.

4. Insight:

We gained some really important information by using this tool. For example:

•  We found out that one of the most critical information the end-users wanted in the service was  easy and understandable info about lab-tests and medical records. One of the most irritating  thing in other services was that all of the info was written to medical experts, not the patient  and certainly not in a language that is easy to understand without having to google it

•  Chat as a service was greatly appreciated by all of the customers. The learning launches  helped us to find a nice way to combine chat, pictures, video and medical records in a visually  nice flow

•  Self-assessment and self-measuring is not interesting as such. If you have some medical  issue you need to address and follow-up, then this could be relevant

This also helped us to choose some quite easy to implement solutions, instead of some superfancy  application. Our project team and customer really believes that we saved a big portion of the total  budget and that the first launch will be out faster and address right problems.

5. Approach:

We have used this approach many times before in our company for many clients and it is one of the  key tools we use in service design. We try to learn and change the way of doing things all the time. In  this case we could have used the help of healthcare professionals even more. In the first live test we  are now doing, we have learned some valuable things from the healthcare specialist side within the  service that we could have used even earlier. So, when doing learning launches, try to get all the  needed professionals and stakeholders with you in early stages.

