Case study · Customer experience & service design

Designing the patient experience of a new medical centre

Client: ENERI, with Philips
Year: 2022–2023
Role: Design Lead
Where: Amsterdam and Buenos Aires

Render of the Innovation Campus in Buenos Aires, with green public space between new buildings — The Innovation Campus in Buenos Aires, where the new centre is planned. Render by the project architects

The challenge

ENERI is a clinic in Buenos Aires with an international reputation as a centre of excellence for neurovascular diseases. To expand, it planned a new Medical Innovation Center at the city's Innovation Campus: a leading private neuro- and cardiovascular centre that uses innovation to set the end-to-end patient journey apart, attract more patients and grow its research.

ENERI asked Philips to help build a vision for the new centre and define future patient needs and experience flows, before the building was designed.

My role

As Design Lead, I set the vision for the approach, tools and methods, and coordinated clinical experts, hospital planners, designers and architects through a complex stakeholder landscape and very tight constraints.

Framed the client's five-year ambition and a vision for the new centre, and helped the clinical team choose three representative patient types to design for.
Led research with 11 patients and families and 28 staff members to understand needs, expectations and current experience flows.
Ran trend research on technological, clinical and spatial innovation, distilled into 30 trigger cards for co-creation.
Designed and facilitated co-creation sessions with staff from each clinical area to envision the future care experience.
Synthesised the results into three future patient personas, future experience journeys and five innovation charters.

The four pillars of the vision: optimal communications, personalised medicine, advanced imaging for integrated care, data-enabled care — The vision for the new centre

Clinical staff around a table covered in sticky notes during a brain-writing exercise — Clinical staff in a brain-writing session

A future patient journey showing the vision, phases of care, patient needs, staff activities, and spatial and technological requirements — A future patient journey: phases of care, patient needs, staff activities, and spatial and technological requirements

Trend trigger cards used to inspire future-oriented ideas — Trigger cards from the trend research

Innovation charters for four thematic clusters, from human-centred holistic care to patient engagement — Innovation charters for the priority themes

Three future patient personas: stroke, aneurysm and cardiology patients — Three future patient personas

Outcome

The personas, future experience journeys and innovation charters were presented to ENERI's C-suite, with recommendations on how to turn the vision into a concrete plan and bring staff along in their culture and ways of working.

All clinical, spatial and technological requirements were shared with the hospital planners and architects, who used them to start designing the new medical centre.

A first sketch of the building section, with floors allocated from the requirements — A first sketch of the space, based on the requirements we delivered