Nebraska Medicine hospitality
Using Jobs-to-be-Done, design thinking, and experience design to reimagine a hospital's travel and lodging experience.
Mapping the Emotional Journey to Create Sustainable Change
As Nebraska Medicine continued to grow, a strategic decision was made to close its onsite hotel that was used predominately by patients and their families. As a result, the Nebraska Medicine patient experience team needed a way to reimagine the travel and lodging experience with the constraint of zero on-campus lodging. With a recently renewed focus on patient experience within the organization, Nebraska Medicine knew that the most valuable, creative, and relevant insights would come from a human-centered approach to ideation.
“I think it’s fantastic... It’s a way of looking at what our patients experience, starting from ‘what is it they want to feel? What is it they want to know?’”
- Chaise Camp, Executive Director of Patient ExperienceUtilization of empathy-based qualitative research
To address the initial research phase for this project, Cast & Hue employed a largely qualitative methodology. This approach, called Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), is a research method used for understanding consumer behavior and decision-making.
This technique helped to uncover patients’ behaviors and decisions when navigating their patient journey, as it digs deep into a job a patient or family member is trying to accomplish. One of the more interesting aspects of JTBD is that it takes the perspective that purchasing decisions are based on more than just features, but instead are often driven by hidden motivations and needs.
Ten former and current patients of Nebraska Medicine and three non-Nebraska Medicine patients were interviewed for this project, as well as key stakeholders from multiple service lines and internal departments. Each of these statements revealed hidden contexts and true needs that may have otherwise gone undiscovered.
Ideation through design thinking
As an output of qualitative research, the Jobs-to-be-Done interviews uncovered dozens of patient needs. Those needs were synthesized into major themes across the travel and lodging journey. Within those themes, there were significant gaps between the service delivery and patient expectations which, if addressed, could dramatically improve the overall patient experience. Those major unmet needs were converted into problem statements to be used as the focal point of design thinking sessions with patients and staff.
Nine Nebraska Medicine patients and family members and over twenty Nebraska Medicine staff members were invited to participate in a full-day design thinking workshop. The problem statements for those workshops were, “How might we help patients settle in and tend to their needs during their long-term stay in Omaha?” and “How might Nebraska Medicine better equip me to deal with the unknown while planning my stay in Omaha?”
The workshop yielded over one hundred solutions ranging from small ideas like a bag of quarters for late-arriving patients to use in vending machines to a community house where long-term stay patients can cook, wash clothes, and interact with other long-term patients.
Creating a shared experience
The viable design thinking solutions created during the patient workshop would lay the foundation for the new Nebraska Medicine travel and lodging experience.
From this foundation, the Cast & Hue team created an experience blueprint to catalog the main solutions and how those solutions would not only meet the needs of patients, but do so in a way that produces positive and uplifting experiences. In doing so, they plotted not only touchpoints, but the corresponding narratives, emotional drivers, and wayfinding elements. Touchpoints were crafted around four "continua", or experience guidelines: Hearth, Synchronicity, Alliance, and “Nebraska Nice.”