UX: it's all about the patient and clinician experience

As a hospital or health organisation clinician, patient or carer, you may have heard about the importance of UX (user experience) and the impact on daily delivery of health care.

User experience (UX) design, service design, design thinking and co-design are all phrases that have entered the everyday vocabulary of clinicians and managers working on innovation in healthcare delivery.

It may be new terminology, but everyone agrees that ‘design’ has an important role to play in the delivery of innovative models of care.

So, how do you get started with design on your healthcare projects?

There are some practical steps involved in engaging stakeholders and consumers in the design of innovative healthcare services and products.

You also need to understand:

• What are UX and usability?
• What problems are disciplines like UX design and usability engineering trying to solve?
• What are the symptoms of these problems?
• What are some examples of prevention strategies around, and solutions to, these problems and what do those solutions look like?
• What are some useful skills in this space that participants can apply back in their workplaces?
• Where to from here in relation to usability and UX in health IT and digital health … what does the future look like?

Hospital and healthcare professionals are invited to learn about UX at a special one-day event at the upcoming Health Informatics Conference 2018 (HIC) in Sydney from 29 July–1 August.

A dedicated UX day on Sunday, 29 July features two special workshops:

Usability Workshop, led by Bennett Lauber, Chief Experience Officer, The Usability People.

In this workshop, participants will be taken through the detail of achieving good usability. It will cover issues such as usability specification and design, usability engineering, testing and certification.

Design Workshop, led by Chris Marmo, from Paper Giant, with Pamela Scicluna, from Kianza, a health technology company and UX expert Bernard Schokman.

This workshop will walk through two case studies in detail, explaining all the practical steps involved in engaging stakeholders and consumers in the design of innovative healthcare services and products.

The one-day event will also feature keynote speakers, special case studies and a panel discussion.

HISA has launched a community of practice for those interested in exploring and learning about health user experience (UX).

“All clinicians and healthcare professionals share something in common with their patients — navigating the health system can be a tough slog,” said HISA CEO Dr Louise Schaper.

“High on the list for HISA’s UX Community of Practice is raising awareness about this wicked problem — improving the clinician and patient user experience across healthcare settings with all the challenges that presents.

“When clinicians get involved in co-designing systems, we are on the right path for a great healthcare experience,” Dr Schaper said.

The UX Network community of practice is led by UX expert Chris Bain, Professor of Practice, Digital Health
Faculty of IT, Monash University.

Prof. Bain said: “We’d all be in a much better place if systems were more usable and clinicians had a positive experience of health IT.

“While clinicians can sometimes be poor at communicating the exact problem to which IT is a possible solution, in no small part it is the role of informaticians and other relevant professionals to glean this information.

“Not providing specifics, however, can lead to ambiguity and frustration, and root problems can remain unsolved.

For more information on the HISA UX Network Community of Practice, call the HISA office on (03) 9326 3311.

Join Bennett Lauber and other UX leaders at the health UX workshop at HIC 2018, Australia’s digital health conference, in Sydney on July 29, 2018. Bookings at www.hisa.org.au/hic.