Two leading healthcare organizations collaborated to set a new gold standard for clinical guidelines used worldwide. Their process relied on volunteer clinicians working with outdated tools like Word and email, creating inefficiencies. The teams needed a thorough assessment of their current workflow to guide the selection of a modern content authoring tool and improve collaboration, enabling the delivery of timely, accessible guidelines.
tools
Figma
Miro
THE DESIGN PROBLEM
How might we streamline the clinical guideline development process to enable efficient collaboration & deliver timely, accessible guidelines?
STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
We conducted UX interviews and focus groups with staff members, volunteers, and key stakeholders in order to:
Understand each stage of the clinical guideline development process
Identify what was working well and where the pain points were
Capture unmet needs and aspirations for the future
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After synthesizing our findings, three major themes emerged from the feedback and insights gathered:
High Volunteer Effort: The workload required of volunteers is considerable, posing challenges for clinicians who are already managing demanding schedules.
Resistance to Change: Team members exhibited hesitancy to adopt new processes or tools, often rooted in entrenched mindsets and resistance to disrupting established routines.
Critical Need for Speed and Efficiency: The current processes are significantly lacking in speed and efficiency, highlighting an urgent need for streamlined workflows and improved tools.
"The end result is an impressive document that has changed the practice of medicine but I think we're just doing it by sheer hard work"
ALIGNMENT WORKSHOP
To ensure the success of the initiative and encourage team buy-in, we facilitated an alignment workshop designed to bring the team together in a collaborative environment. This session encouraged empathy by validating our personas, uncovering shared challenges, and prioritizing requirements for a new content authoring tool. By giving team members a voice in the process, we not only ensured their perspectives were heard but also strengthened their commitment to the solution.
We started with a design thinking exercise to build a shared understanding of participants' motivations and concerns about adopting a new tool and framework for their established workflows. This approach helped foster transparency and trust early in the process.
The team was then invited to review and provide feedback on the rough drafts of the personas we created. This collaborative step ensured the personas accurately represented the individuals and made the team feel included in the process.
We collaborated to prioritize the list of requirements created from our conversations with the team. This helped stakeholders clearly understand which features were essential and where compromises could be made when selecting a content authoring tool.
PERSONA REFINEMENT
The alignment workshop revealed critical gaps in our understanding of the team’s workflow, highlighting the absence of two key personas in the process. Recognizing the need to address this, we conducted additional conversations with stakeholders to accurately represent these roles and their unique needs. At the same time, we refined the existing personas by incorporating the valuable feedback gathered during the workshop, ensuring they reflected the team’s lived experiences and challenges. These insights became the foundation for developing a comprehensive service blueprint, which mapped out key areas of impact, opportunities for improvement, and a clear path forward.
*Full assets are available in PDF format upon request. While anonymized, these materials are shared selectively to respect confidentiality.
SERVICE BLUEPRINT: MAPPING COMPLEXITY WITH CLARITY
To untangle the intricacies of the clinical guideline development process, we started by creating an initial draft of the service blueprint based on insights from our interviews. This draft revealed a highly complex process with numerous moving parts and dependencies. Recognizing the importance of making this complexity approachable, we designed 4 separate blueprints representing distinctive phases of the process to balance depth with accessibility. This allowed stakeholders to understand the process without extensive explanation.
The final blueprints were vetted by the staff and highlighted:
Process Variations: Where steps differed depending on circumstances
Tools in Use: The software and systems supporting the current process
Timelines and Phases: A high-level view of the general timeline and distinct phases of guideline creation
*Full assets are available in PDF format upon request. While anonymized, these materials are shared selectively to respect confidentiality.
"We can't copy and paste our guideline development process into a tool and think all will be fixed."
Layered into the blueprints were our key insights, such as:
Pain Points: Challenges and inefficiencies faced by stakeholders
Strengths: Aspects of the process that were working well
Opportunities: Areas where process and technology improvements could make the most impact
Additionally, we highlighted the critical path (the essential steps required to complete the process) separating them from supplementary tasks. This distinction enabled stakeholders to clearly see where their attention and resources were most needed.
Although the client initially engaged us to define requirements for a content authoring tool, our user-centric approach revealed that the tool alone would not address all their challenges. Gaining a deeper understanding of their current state was essential to identifying the processes and resources required to support the successful implementation of the new technology.
