Forward-thinking healthcare organizations are always looking for ways to step up their game and drive new growth. But the truth is, if yours is like many healthcare companies, identifying opportunities to improve your digital experiences isn’t very difficult. You know you lag behind the leading consumer brands. And, digitally speaking, you also know where you want your organization to go. That part’s easy. The trouble lies in actually getting there.
Consider the following scenario: You identify the need for a new digital initiative based on your organization’s current KPIs and a hearty dose of market research. Perhaps it’s time to develop an mHealth app, revamp your member portal so it’s more user friendly, or update an internal tool. Whatever it is, it seems straightforward enough. Unfortunately, your engineering and operational counterparts quickly disabuse you of that notion. Pretty soon it’s crystal clear that your “straightforward” project is much more mountain than molehill.
Sound familiar?
There’s no getting around it: From regulatory requirements to legacy systems, digital initiatives in the healthcare space are inherently complex. So complex, in fact, that you may not know where to begin. Whatever you do, don’t let yourself stall out in frustration before you even get started. With the right partner to guide you, you can break your next digital initiative into manageable chunks — and garner some momentum-building quick wins in the process.
Complex Digital Problems, Streamlined Digital Health Solutions: Enter the UX Strategy Sprint
If you want to actually solve your healthcare organization’s most vexing digital challenges, you’ll need to start with the right approach. Rather than attempting to tackle the entire problem at once, your goal is to develop a clear, actionable plan that takes things one achievable step at a time.
At UpTop Health, we use something called a UX Strategy Sprint to do just that. Our UX Strategy Sprint is a structured, 8-10 week process that enables healthcare organizations like yours to quickly define problems and align around solutions. The Sprint is composed of a series of strategic activities, including:
- Defining your problem statement
- Customer journey mapping
- Cross-functional ideation
- Impact-versus-effort exercises
- KPI reviews and prioritization
- UX feature prioritization
These and other activities are designed to give your organization a clear understanding of the problem at hand, encourage alignment, uncover solutions, facilitate informed decisions, and prioritize opportunities for improvement. At the same time, we help our clients identify and front-load low-hanging fruit. These quick wins can be used as confidence-building stepping stones toward a larger goal and vision.
Bottom line? A UX Strategy Sprint is the key to creating a prioritized UX roadmap — one that breaks your complex initiative into bite-sized wins and allows you to fly fast with little risk to your business.
Is a UX Strategy Sprint Right for Your Healthcare Organization?
A UX Strategy Sprint may makes sense for your healthcare company if:
- You have a major digital initiative in mind, but you’re not sure yet whether you’re ready to commit to the full project. If that’s the case, the UX Strategy Sprint can give you a sense of the full scope of your potential project so you can make an informed decision about how to proceed. It can also help you identify a phased approach — one that allows you to start small and build toward your larger goal in a stepwise fashion.
- Your last digital project didn’t go as planned. Whether your initiative dragged on interminably, went over budget, or failed to achieve your desired results, you know you need to take a different approach. A UX Strategy Sprint offers an effective framework for project planning. One that allows you to execute your project on budget and on time, all while delivering in the results department, too.
- You’re stuck. When you first kicked off your current digital initiative, you thought your problem was well-defined. As a result, you started down a specific path. But you didn’t get very far before new user requirements popped up, previously unforeseen technology constraints were uncovered, and new business requirements were piled on. You know you’ve taken a wrong turn, but you can’t seem to figure out how to get back on track. With a UX Strategy Sprint, you can successfully reroute your project with a clear and actionable roadmap to your desired destination.
- You need help getting aligned. You know what your business needs to do in order to keep pace with the competition. But sometimes it feels like your colleagues on the IT and design teams are dead set on shooting down your big ideas. While you focus on the desired future state, they focus on the obstacles that stand in your way. So much so that your organization is struggling to align around a plan of action. A UX Strategy Sprint can bring all your stakeholders into productive conversation — and achieve the alignment you need to move forward.
- You’re overwhelmed by your project’s complexity. You’ve done enough digging to know that your digital initiative is something of a Pandora’s box. Now you’re not so sure you want to open it at all. A UX Strategy Sprint can give you the tools to untangle even the thorniest problems and break them down into bite-sized pieces.
Your healthcare organization’s most daunting digital challenges don’t have to stop you in your tracks. With the right process (and expertise) to guide you, you can tackle even the biggest problems with confidence and ease.
It’s time to unlock your most challenging digital problems and create a realistic plan to achieve the results you need. Let’s get the ball rolling.