Shaping Clinical and Patient Experience at a Community Health Clinic

Client: Providence Community Health Centers

The ask: To design an optimal patient and clinician experience for a high-risk patient population.

Methods: One-on-one interviews, card sort, journey mapping

Language: Spanish

Impact: The report we authored was handed off to the main stakeholders at the clinic. Their plan was to use our report to inform their architectural plans as well as shape the clinical and patient-facing experience.

Research Insight: High-risk patients live highly unstable lives that can vary from moment to moment — whether it’s their daytime availability because of their work schedule, or their transportation and financial resources such as having a car or a bank card for rideshares. Therefore, their ease of access to healthcare is highly variable.

Process: We interviewed patients and doctors about their experiences at the clinic, from how they arrived at the clinic to the moment they left it. We mapped their journeys and provided a set of recommendations based on what was already going well in their daily journeys and what could be improved. Some of this included recommendations about the spatial layout that would best facilitate the critical moments we identified.

I conducted the interviews in Spanish, while a fellow researcher conducted the English-language interviews.