SERVICE DESIGN | UX DESIGN | Product DEVELOPMENT
A study showed that 42% of patients are missing their appointments. This costs the healthcare system $150 billion loss annually.
Duration — 8 weeks
My Role — Service Designer, Product & Visual Designer
RESEARCH
Research began by understanding the dental no-show landscape through academic articles and in-depth interviews of 14 patients 2 staff members and 2 dentists to determine gaps.
INSIGHTS
Synthesising our research, we were able to narrow down on four emerging gaps and leverage points that we wished to probe further in the process of making.
01 Anxiety Context:
How can the offerings address the emotion of anxiety tied to varied factors within the system?
As we began our research a key finding that emerged was the feeling of anxiety, fear and pain that occurred before appointments. Unclear procedures, costs, time, and past experiences of unfriendly doctors discouraged patients from showing up to their next appointments. For some inadequate service recovery caused anxiety.
02. The patient is not fulfilling roles
How might dental health be prioritise?
Dental Health is not a priority. Many internal and external factors create no shows in patients. Besides anxiety, work and personal barriers, patient’s forgetfulness, lack of interest and transportation issues contributed to no show reasons.
03. Inadequate patient research orientation
How do we bring together verbal & non-verbal interactions to facilitate upward communication to support trust and care in the service?
Small scale practitioners fail to measure no shows and are unaware of its impact on their business. They fail to retain patients because there is no opportunity for the patients and doctors to communicate.
04. Dental care is exorbitantly expensive
How can we provide a solution for the financial constraints of dentistry?
The cost of health care services has risen over the years. Dental education, government costs such sterilisation procedures testing and upgrades, universal precautions, licensing etc create the large amount of expenses.
SERVICE OFFERINGS
Bita is a service that mediates between patients, dentists and insurance providers that observes, analyses and recommends actions through a smart brush to eliminate uncertainty thus reducing the no show rate.
Dental insurance
Smart brush
Digital system
Connect with dentist
KEY DIGITAL INTERACTIONS
Booking a recommended appointment
Booking appointment
Editing appointment
BITA’S VALUE CO-CREATION SPHERE
DISCOVER
By applying the gaps model of service quality the team was able to isolate key service deficiencies that directly affect no-show rates. These gaps are; anxiety context, dental health is expensive and not a priority, customers not fulfilling roles, and insufficient relationship focus.
Strategy
Insurance provider like Delta Dental provides their customer with Bita kit on subscription basis helping better assess patient risk, potentially reducing patient premiums with Bita. Patients are more connected to a dentist and engaged in her dental health
USER
How and when should the service interact with Kate?
The product should interact with Kate from the very beginning. Even before her pain begins, to reduce her discomfort, guilt, and anxiety by visiting the dentist timely and not missing her appointments.
DESIGN
Service user testing
Insights
Most important benefit is the information and control they get of their own health
They would like to know what to do when having high risks.
Privacy is a big concern.
The promotions are the biggest incentives.
It improves relationships with their practices by adding trust and enabling easier reach
CARD SORTING
I conducted open and close card sorting with list of services & products, help needed, information to find, activities to perform to various tasks to understand the heirachy of information for the digital platform.
Features and Functions
I started by listing all the features and functions and iterated different flows for the interactions.
SITE MAP
Insights
Information on the home page is overwhelming. Features on the home page overlap with other pages. Settings could be labelled as a Profile page and bring clarity. Distinguish features for profile and settings. The progress label is misleading and not understood clearly.
FINAL SITE MAP
TASK FLOW 1
Book a new appointment
Edit appointment
