The Challenge
The team had plenty of signals, but no clear answer about what they meant together.
The digital check-in team was balancing a wide range of information about the future of the experience.
Different locations favored different check-in options. Usage data suggested where problems might exist. Employees and stakeholders had their own stories about what worked and what didn't. Hardware and support requirements affected which options were practical to maintain. Stakeholders also brought different perspectives on which options would best support patients, employees and the organization over time.
The team had assumptions about which digital check-in options would best serve the organization over time, but lacked enough direct evidence from patients and frontline employees to understand the tradeoffs and confidently evaluate those assumptions.
The questions extended beyond preference. Why did some patients engage with digital check-in while others still preferred the desk? What made patients feel confident their check-in was complete? How did digital options affect the employees supporting patients when something went wrong? And could findings from one location reasonably apply elsewhere?
Digital check-in also wasn't a single experience. Different campuses and community locations had implemented the available options differently, which meant studying one environment alone would provide an incomplete picture.
I proposed a broader research program to bring those signals together and build a more coherent understanding of how digital check-in was actually working across the organization.
My Role
I turned a broad set of product questions into a connected research program.
As lead researcher, I designed and coordinated the research strategy across three major campuses and the regional health system, covering multiple digital check-in options and both sides of the experience.
I led the research planning, employee research, survey design and analysis, and cross-study synthesis. I also designed the patient interview research. During campus fieldwork, a product-design partner facilitated many of the brief patient intercept interviews and provided the resulting notes, while I led the longer contextual patient interviews, as well as the overall processing, analysis and integration of patient evidence with the rest of the program.
I managed the work as an evolving research program rather than waiting for every study to conclude before sharing value. Early findings from the field research were synthesized and presented to product stakeholders while later phases were still underway, allowing the evidence to begin informing priorities before the final cross-study synthesis was complete.
My Responsibilities
RESEARCH LEADERSHIP
Strategy & planning
Research design
Product partnership
Research communication
HANDS-ON RESEARCH Field research & interviews Survey design & analysis Stakeholder research Cross-method synthesis
Research Strategy
I designed the program to understand the experience from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of scale.
The team's questions couldn't be answered by evaluating a single check-in option or studying one location. Different campuses had implemented digital check-in differently, patients and employees experienced the same tools from very different perspectives, and existing operational and usage data couldn't fully explain the reasons behind those experiences.
I structured the research as six connected efforts, combining contextual qualitative research with surveys designed to broaden and test the emerging picture.
Regional health system research
The broader health system included dozens of community hospitals with their own implementations and operating contexts, making research at every location impractical. I interviewed regional managers as well as frontline check-in employees and managers at selected locations to understand how digital check-in was being used, experienced and supported across the regional health system.
Patient survey
I surveyed patients who had used digital check-in to examine some of the patterns emerging from the qualitative research across a broader population while also investigating questions better suited to quantitative research.
Employee survey
I also surveyed frontline employees across the major campuses, receiving 459 responses, including more than 350 with additional open-ended feedback. This survey allowed me both to test themes from the fieldwork at greater scale and to investigate additional questions about employee experience, preferences and perceptions.
What We Learned
1
DIGITAL COMPLETE ≠ CONFIDENTLY CHECKED IN
2
PATIENT SUCCESS = CONVENIENCE
EMPLOYEE SUCCESS = RELIABILITY + SUPPORT
Patients and employees didn't always prefer the same solution.
Patients tended to favor the option that offered the greatest convenience and flexibility, reflecting their preference for digital experiences that fit easily into their arrival process.
Frontline employees, however, placed greater value on another existing option because they found it dependable within their workflow and could more easily recognize and intervene when a patient needed help.
The findings complicated what initially appeared to be a straightforward choice between digital check-in options. An option that aligned well with patient expectations didn't necessarily meet employees' operational needs, while another option offered important advantages for reliability and hands-on support. The research demonstrated why neither perspective could be considered in isolation.
Why it mattered: Patient preference alone couldn't determine the future experience. Decisions also needed to account for reliability, exception handling and the people responsible for supporting patients when something went wrong.
3
DIGITAL CHECK-IN → EXCEPTION → HUMAN SUPPORT
One goal of digital check-in was to move routine interactions away from the traditional desk, allowing employees to focus on more complex needs that required face-to-face assistance.
In practice, digital check-in could sometimes shift or duplicate work rather than eliminate it.
Incomplete pre-arrival requirements could still require employee intervention. Patients who weren't confident that check-in had worked could seek reassurance from staff. When digital options created confusion or raised flags, employees still needed to step in and help.
Check-in employees also described the human interaction at a desk as a valued and enjoyable part of their daily work, while many patients likewise appreciated the reassurance, warmth and welcome desk staff provided.
Why it mattered: The future of check-in wasn't simply a choice between digital convenience and human service. The stronger opportunity was to define how the two should work together: providing digital experiences where they created genuine convenience while preserving effective human support where confidence, complexity or exceptions required it.
The Bigger Picture
We started by looking at digital check-in options, but we ended up looking at the entire arrival experience.
As findings accumulated across locations, audiences and methods, it became increasingly difficult to treat digital check-in as a set of independent products.
The experience began before patients arrived. Whether required information and forms were complete could affect what happened during check-in. Once onsite, the physical environment influenced whether patients noticed and understood their options. The digital experience itself needed to provide enough guidance and confirmation for patients to feel ready to move on. When something was incomplete, confusing or unexpected, employees became part of the experience again.
Seen together, those connections reframed the problem:
Pre-Arrival
Arrival
Digital Check-In
Confirmation
Exceptions
Improving any one interface could help, but it couldn't guarantee a better overall experience if problems elsewhere in that chain continued to create uncertainty or additional work.
The research crossed organizational boundaries, too.
Looking at the whole experience revealed opportunities involving product design, physical spaces, communication, pre-arrival processes, technology infrastructure and employee workflows.
That breadth was valuable, but it also exposed an organizational challenge. The digital check-in product team could directly act on only part of what the research revealed. Other opportunities required coordination with teams responsible for different parts of the patient experience.
That became an important lesson from the program: understanding an experience end to end is only part of the challenge. For broader findings to lead to change, you also need to understand who can act on them and involve the right partners early enough to help move the work forward.
Influence & Outcomes
The research began influencing priorities before the full program was complete.
Rather than waiting until every research stream was finished, I synthesized emerging findings from the campus and regional health system research and brought them to the product team while the broader program was still underway.
Together, we worked through the pain points and opportunities identified through the research and considered what could be addressed in the near term, what warranted further investment and what represented a longer-term opportunity.
Some findings strengthened the evidence behind issues the team already knew about. Others introduced needs and opportunities they had not previously considered.
The result was a prioritized set of opportunities the product team could begin incorporating into its backlog while the patient and employee surveys and broader synthesis continued.
The completed research gave the team a more nuanced basis for future decisions.
The broader program did more than identify usability improvements. It provided a cross-enterprise understanding of how patients and employees experienced digital check-in across different implementations, connecting qualitative findings with quantitative survey results and existing product evidence.
One of the most consequential findings challenged the idea that a single digital check-in option could be evaluated primarily through patient preference. Although patients often favored greater convenience and flexibility, frontline employees identified meaningful advantages in a different option, particularly its reliability and their ability to recognize and resolve problems.
This gave the team evidence to reconsider how it evaluated the available options, bringing operational needs and employee support into decisions that might otherwise have focused more heavily on the patient experience.
It also expanded the opportunity space beyond individual digital tools, identifying improvements related to preparation before arrival, communication and expectations, the physical environment, privacy, technology reliability and employee support.
Not every opportunity could be owned by the digital check-in team itself. For needs that crossed into other parts of the organization, the research clarified where additional ownership and collaboration would be needed.
THE STRATEGIC SHIFT
The program ultimately helped move the conversation from "Which digital check-in option should we support?" toward "How should the entire check-in experience work for both patients and employees?"
Reflection
Enterprise research needs an influence strategy as well as a research strategy.
I'm proud that this research looked beyond individual products to understand the broader experience patients and employees were navigating. That wider lens helped uncover issues and opportunities that wouldn't have emerged from evaluating the digital tools independently.
It also created one of the project's biggest challenges: the research crossed more organizational boundaries than the team that requested it could directly influence.
If I were approaching a similar program today, I would identify the teams responsible for different parts of the experience much earlier. As the work expanded across pre-arrival processes, physical spaces, technology and employee workflows, I would bring key partners from those areas into the work before the final synthesis.
That wouldn't necessarily change what the research found. It would give broader findings a better chance of reaching the people positioned to act on them.
The project reinforced an important lesson in my research practice: finding the bigger problem is valuable, but planning how the organization can respond to what you find is part of the research strategy, too.