healthcare

We’re Together In Our Fight Against COVID-19!

March 24, 2020 Happenings
COVID-19

It’s been a week since Ontario declared an emergency facing increasing COVID-19 cases in the province, and largely to prevent people from gathering in large numbers. In other words, practicing ‘social distancing’ to avoid contact with infected persons, even if it’s business as usual for some of them. The tremors from the Coronavirus blowout are being felt everywhere even as I’m writing this piece. It all seems like the world has being pounded by an army of invisible invaders while it was napping, but while the governments are doing everything in their power to pushback COVID-19 the residents are clearly losing the plot. The objective to decrease the infections cannot be achieved without everyone deciding to isolate themselves voluntarily and by maintaining a strict personal hygiene routine considering that the virus has the potential to survive on various kinds of materials for days.

Since it’s a new virus our immune systems are being compromised — there is no sign of an infection for days, and moreover, there’s no vaccine or treatment which is currently available. The only way to safeguard ourselves from this brutal threat and that of our society is through preventive measures of self-isolation during infection, and through ‘social distancing’. By not following these precautionary measures, we’re only adding to the risk of an unprecedented and a catastrophic scale that could push our nations into turmoil and affect our livelihoods for several decades. We’re already seeing the economic impacts, so far – the value of gold has plummeted, oil and gas prices are at is lowest since June 2001, the global travel industry has been crippled by cancellations and nationwide lockdowns, and there have been large scale layoffs in almost every major industry worldwide as a domino effect. Besides the official postponement of the biggest event of all, the Tokyo Olympics. It’d be completely appropriate to say, that as a global community, we’re going through our worst nightmares arising out of an inconspicuous element of danger.

Heart of the matter is, we all should be committed in our struggle against COVID-19 with the rules of our involvement pretty straightforward. Get yourself informed and share the info, maintain strict personal hygiene, and avoid contact with the outside world unless if it’s absolutely, positively, necessary.

What’s ‘Social Distancing‘?

– avoiding crowded places and non-essential gatherings
– avoiding common greetings, such as handshakes
– limiting contact with people at higher risk like older adults and those in poor health
– keeping a distance of at least 2 arms-length (approximately 2 metres) from others

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Prevention and risks
Design Thinking

‘Patient-Centred’ Experience And Digital Transformation Technologies

December 5, 2019 Design

Summary

The message coming from every keynote, panel discussion, article or research study is clear that digital transformation is not just imperative for all enterprises but it will permanently alter consumer interactions with their products and services.1 Digital transformation is the application of digital technologies such as mobile data analytics and smart embedded devices to reinvent customer relations and business processes. Worldwide spending on digital transformation related technologies and services is expected to approach $2 trillion by 2022, according to IDC. 2 Hence, the healthcare industry as well, has to transform its processes to respond to the new realities of digital technologies in an increasingly competitive world by continuing to invest in digital technology. But at the same time, there’s a need to reshape patient-care operations in this dynamic environment. Amid the intricacies of digital sophistication, the clamour to put customer services and customer expectations at the centre of all digital and service interactions has grown stronger than ever before. Adopting a customer-centric mindset in unifying products and services through human-insights, and not through digital transformation, is an important piece in the customer experience endeavour.

In the wake of digital transformation, businesses are overlooking consumer behaviour favouring instant gratification through technology hoping customer loyalty and dollars will follow, but they’re missing a fundamental point. Instead of depending upon digital transformation as a means for delivering an exceptional experience they should be focussing on customer needs through gathering & relating human-insights to actual needs. It is therefore important for businesses to build a customer experience strategy that looks at finding insights instead of merely depending upon digital transformation for analytics — the better experience customers have, the more repeat and positive reviews they’ll receive while simultaneously reducing customer complaints and frustrations. 3

In this context, what should be the strategy for the healthcare industry to drive digital transformation from a ‘user-first’ standpoint? What measures must healthcare businesses need to adopt for catering to patient needs & expectations? What parts of their business strategy must need to change for encouraging a positive change & enhancing the quality of healthcare services with technology? Most importantly, could technology alone be adequate in solving human-centred problems? These and many more such conclusions around an overall healthcare optimization planning could be explored by applying relevant phases of the ‘patient-centred design model’.

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Digital Healthcare For Gen Z & Millennials

March 24, 2019 Design Technology
Accenture-2019-Digital-Health-Consumer-Survey

This weekend, I studied an interesting survey published by Accenture Consulting on the prediction of future healthcare for younger consumers. It’s called ‘Accenture 2019 Digital Health Consumer Survey’ and the respondents of this study were from the United States though it essentially provided some wonderful insights into the millennial and Gen Z’s behavioural patterns in general. A striking feature of this survey was the influence of future technology on a wide range of generations beginning with the 20s and the millennials who would become the most influential generation for healthcare consumerism. These are some of my notes from the study.

Distinctive User Groups

At the onset, I came across one of the most distinct categorizations of the user age groups within this survey. The study has been fairly distributed among all classes of consumers including even the generation of consumers who were born in the late 20s. The list of the user group is comprehensive as noted below.

  • Gen Z (born 1997 onward)
  • Millennials (born 1981 to 1996)
  • Gen X (born 1965 to 1980)
  • Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964)
  • Silent Generation (born 1928 to 1945)

Prominent Healthcare Insights

Traditional / Non-Traditional Healthcare – doctors, healthcare professionals, clinics, medical centres and doctor’s offices are some of the established types of traditional healthcare services. In contrast, walk-in or retail clinics, outpatient surgery hospitals, virtual health (via the phone, on video or apps), on-demand services or digital therapeutics are some examples of non-traditional healthcare services. [1]

  • Younger consumers are moving away from traditional channels and adopting technology and non-traditional healthcare.
  • The loyalty of younger generation patients is no longer assured, and the providers who heed to the changing dynamics of the consumers would be strongly positioned.
  • Gen Z and Millennials are less likely to have a primary care physician (PCP) compared to Gen X, baby boomers and the silent generation.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”” class=”” cite=”” link=”” color=””]Gen Z is the most likely generation to seek out wellness practices (e.g. yoga, acupuncture) beyond Western medicine. With millennials projected to become the largest generation in 2019, this generation holds the most power to influence future healthcare models.[/perfectpullquote]

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Wait Times Management For The Digital Age

December 12, 2018 Design Technology

I am involved in an engaging organizational innovation exercise with a team comprising business consultants and senior leadership of one of the top healthcare companies in Canada that own and operate over a 1000 pharmacy locations across the country. Apart from several themes one of the aims of this 3-month long exercise is to understand the barriers in the delivery of timely services to patients and finding an innovative solution to wait-times. So, what exactly is a ‘wait-time’ in the context of a pharmacy? In simple terms, it is typically that period in a given service parameter in which a pharmacy customer (patient or caregiver) has to wait before he/she is dispensed the prescribed medication and depending upon the traffic of a specific pharmacy location that period could sometimes run into hours. The current demographic of pharmacy patients consists largely of ‘baby boomers’ who were born in the 40s-60s but that won’t be the case forever because more millennials, the cohort of people generally born in the 80s-90s, have begun to emerge as an influential group not just for healthcare but the retail industry at large. This segment is most prominent for its early adoption of digital apps and automation but the ‘boomers’ aren’t laggards either with adopting a digital lifestyle. As we gather around in focusing on and exploring various options I wanted to present some of my views on tackling wait times (WT) in the incumbent age of digitization. Additionally, I also wanted to share some of my observation and learning on wait times with other brands, in particular, IKEA.

Basics of Wait Times

wait times in pharmacy

I would continue with my comprehension of WTs in the context of pharmacies. So, to begin with, what is a wait time and why is it important? In technical terms, a ‘wait-time’ is a crucial factor from the perspective of implementing the prioritization order in a customer queue to ensure that one person’s isolated need/demand does not gain precedence over the others waiting in the line. If managed efficiently on a consistent basis, WTs also play a major role in managing the working time of the pharmacy staff and also helps bring productivity and efficiency into the work culture, such as preparing the medication while the patient waits in anticipation. From a pharmacy standpoint, despite all the clear advantages, there are prevailing challenges which prevents pharmacists from meeting their stated goals. Some of those challenges include lack of team coordination and overlapping (or the lack of) of responsibilities. Then from unskilled staff to complicated digital systems and sometimes even the unavailability of medications at pharmacy locations can not only affect wait-times considerably but could also drastically lower a brand’s value over a period of time. On the other hand, it might be harder to realize but customer wait times are not just limited to pharmacies alone. In fact, in Canada, it’s common for patrons to wait for their turn while availing any form of service just that and experience levels of anxiety and anticipation. Services which have lower levels of expectation generally escape the customers’ ire from bad service experience, whereas others like IKEA have developed a robust & orderly mechanism for addressing wait time challenges using a combination of digitization and environmental factors (store). I have described my experience in IKEA in the post a little later. 

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