Stridewell spine clinic
Designing a new urgent care experience from the ground up using Jobs-to-be-Done, design thinking, and experience design.
Rethinking the urgent care experience from the ground up
When neurosurgeon Dr. Igor Yusupov, founder of Arizona Brain and Spine Center, uncovered a gap in the urgent care marketplace, he decided to create a same-day, spine-focused clinic. To launch this venture, he asked Cast & Hue to partner with him to validate the new offering, name the brand, develop the positioning strategy, design its visual and verbal identity, and architect the entire patient experience for its flagship clinic.
Using JTBD to identify unmet needs in the marketplace
The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework uncovers what emotions and triggers cause a consumer to purchase a product or service, as opposed to demographics or socio-economic attributes. It can also help us segment audiences by the jobs, or needs, they are employing a given product or service to complete for them.
Psychology has taught us that we rarely make decisions based on features and set criteria, but rather that purchasing decisions are often driven by hidden motivations and needs (jobs one is “getting done”). To give an example from outside healthcare, jobs can be as common as a student hiring coffee to stay awake or as uncommon as a student hiring coffee to help their walk to class be more enjoyable.
The Cast & Hue team interviewed more than 20 patients who had experienced back pain and opted to receive care from emergency departments, primary care physicians, or urgent care centers within the past 6 months. The interviews explored the emotional and functional needs the patients were trying to satisfy, as well as the attributes they would look for in a spine-specific clinic.
Transitioning needs to ideas
JTBD identified three core audiences, each with specific needs. Understanding these needs was only the first step though. In order to translate these needs to ideas, Cast & Hue employed design thinking as a tool to guide ideation. Utilizing an empathetic, collaborative approach, Cast & Hue collaborated with potential patients to co-create the key elements of the patient experience at the new clinic, generating dozens of prototypes that would go on to be incorporated in the final experience blueprint.
The path to creating these ideas was important because the co-creative approach ensured that all the ideas that would eventually be implemented into the new clinic were pre-vetted by patients.
Building a patient-driven experience
Armed with the needs and ideas generated during the previous phases, Cast & Hue began the task of creating a blueprint for the new experience. The outline of this blueprint went beyond just organizing the ideas, but instead employed psychological nuggets uncovered during the previous interviews to build specific “continua,” or “experience guidelines,” that would be worked into each phase of treatment. These included continuum such as comfort and education.
In addition to continua and touchpoints, the experience blueprint also identified key front and back stage activities, technology platforms, emotions, and wayfinding elements that would help deliver this experience, as well as an experience narrative to tie everything together.
Launch plan and marketing
Cast & Hue also coordinated with external agencies, architectural firms, and Arizona Brain & Spine staff to create specific recommendations for key elements of the experience, such as seating options, patient materials, and technology platforms. Cast & Hue also directed the creation of a full brand platform, including naming, a logo, marketing launch plan, and a visual style guide.
With an anticipated launch in June 2017, interest from the community is already highly anticipated for a spine-specific clinic such as Stridewell.
