Designing services, environments, interactions and processes for the human experience pose a big challenge for healthcare improvement professionals. This is not just about being more patient‐centred or promoting greater patient participation. It goes much further than this, placing the experience goals of patients and users at the centre of the design process and on the same footing as process and clinical goals.

In this project, we want to tackle this challenge in this way:

• We want to learn by listening to others. We really believe that there are good examples of how hospitals give the patients a central role in optimization processes of services and experiences. With the cases we gather in the project, we want to detect strengths and weaknesses, needs, methods, critical factors and successes in optimizing experiences for patients.
• We want to do case-based research and redesign several experiences in different hospitals ; we want to see if the tools and methods we usually use in designing processes are the right ones. It is very likely that we have to adapt the existing tools and methods into more patient centred experience design tools and methods.
• Finally, we would like to translate these determinations into a toolbox, a roadmap and a database with products, processes and services that create a total experience in care. It has to be easy and practical, with a good mix of tools, a lot of templates, different inspirational cases and a good manual for process facilitators and users. Good before/after examples and figures will illustrate the impact of putting the patient in the middle of the design process.

The need for human-centred, compassionate healthcare is still increasing. In addressing this need, medical educators begin to recognize the importance of patient voices and experiences. But there is an enormous gap between the rhetoric or ideology and the practice. In most countries healthcare systems are still not putting patients and other stakeholders first.

A healthcare process that only focuses on cost, efficiency, speed, correctness and other provided standards is not necessarily favorable for the well being of the patents, their family, the nurses, the doctors,…

What is more, focusing on the needs of different stakeholders, such as the patient and their family, proves to have a positive impact on the clinical outcome as well.

Finally, more and more hospitals feel a sense of necessity to change because patients become aware of the differences between hospitals and as a result they choose more consciously and more informed between alternative hospitals. 

By helping the healthcare sector into the world of experience and service design, the project perfectly fits in the goal of the program to stimulate the public sector to generate innovation demand and innovative solutions for improving public service delivery.

First of all, we want to learn by listening to others. We really believe that there are good examples of how hospitals give the patients a central role in optimization processes of services and experiences. With the cases we gather in the project, we want to detect strengths and weaknesses, needs, methods, critical factors and successes in optimizing experiences for patients.

Secondly, by doing case-based research and redesigning several experiences in different hospitals, we want to see if the tools and methods we usually use in designing processes are the right ones. It is very likely that we have to adapt the existing tools and methods into more patient centred experience design tools and methods.

Finally, we would like to translate these determinations into a toolbox, a roadmap and a database with products, processes and services that create a total experience in care. It has to be easy and practical, with a good mix of tools, a lot of templates, different inspirational cases and a good manual for process facilitators and users. Good before/after examples and figures will illustrate the impact of putting the patient in the middle of the design process.

We are in contact with two Belgian hospitals that are interested in the project.