The Challenge
The opportunity for digital support was broad. The evidence for where it could provide the most value was not.
The clinical care experience itself was not the focus of the team's exploration. Instead, the opportunity centered on the stages surrounding care: from preparing for a visit and arriving on campus through departure and the transition home.
The team saw particular opportunity before arrival. Patients could travel significant distances for care, and the experience of preparing for a visit could vary considerably depending on their circumstances and familiarity with the organization. Yet relatively little research had examined that part of the journey in depth.
There were also potential opportunities throughout the surrounding experience. The team had ideas about places where additional digital support might be useful, and anecdotal evidence suggested that patients encountered gaps and uncertainties along the way. But no existing research brought those stages together into a holistic view of the experience.
That created a larger strategic question. The team needed to understand not only where patients encountered challenges, but which needs represented meaningful opportunities for digital assistance.
Did the same needs appear across different patients and locations? Which parts of the experience required the most additional support? Were seemingly straightforward problems actually more complex when viewed in context? And where could technology add value without disrupting parts of the experience that were already working well?
I proposed a broader research program to understand the stages surrounding care as a connected experience, identify where patient needs were most pronounced, and give the team stronger evidence for deciding where digital support could provide the greatest value.
My Role
I led the overall research program while coordinating multiple research streams into a shared understanding of the patient journey.
As lead researcher, I developed the overall research approach and coordinated work across three complementary streams: a broad patient survey, in-depth patient research across three major campuses and interviews with employees and volunteers who regularly helped patients navigate their visits.
I remained hands-on throughout the program. I reviewed existing research, designed and coordinated the patient survey, and led the patient interview research from planning through analysis and reporting. I conducted the majority of the 30 patient interviews, with a research teammate conducting the remaining sessions, and I analyzed the complete patient interview set.
The two other researchers also had meaningful ownership within the program. One led the survey analysis and developed the majority of the survey report, which we refined together. Another independently led the employee and volunteer research, including its scope, recruiting, interviews and initial reporting.
I then led the cross-study synthesis, bringing those independently developed bodies of evidence together to identify patterns and meaningful differences across patients, locations and stages of the experience and translate them into integrated findings, personas, journeys and opportunity areas.
My Responsibilities
RESEARCH LEADERSHIP
Strategy & planning
Research coordination
Survey design
Research communication
HANDS-ON RESEARCH
Existing research review
Patient interviews & analysis
Cross-method synthesis
Personas & journey mapping
Research Strategy
I designed the program to move from what the organization currently knew toward a more complete, evidence-based understanding of where patients actually needed support.
The team needed both breadth and depth. We needed to understand the journey across a large and varied patient population while also learning how individual circumstances shaped what patients needed and where opportunities for additional support emerged.
I structured the program around complementary sources of evidence, using each stage to test, deepen and sometimes challenge what earlier evidence suggested.
Establish what we already knew, and what we still needed to learn
I began by reviewing 11 previous studies related to different parts of the patient experience. The review established what the organization already knew and helped identify where further research was needed.
Rather than treating those findings as a fixed picture of the experience, I used them as a starting set of themes and hypotheses. As the new research progressed, some were reinforced while others became less important or were contradicted by what we heard directly from patients.
Examine the journey at scale
I designed a detailed patient survey examining patients' most recent experiences stage by stage, from preparing for arrival through their time on campus and departure.
Approximately 6,000 patients were invited to participate, with more than 580 responding. The survey gave us a broader view of needs across the journey and allowed us to examine patterns among patients with different levels of previous experience and other circumstances.
Use the survey to recruit deliberately for depth
Survey respondents became the recruiting pool for 30 in-depth patient interviews across three major campuses.
Rather than recruiting a general sample, I deliberately sought variation in characteristics that could meaningfully shape the experience, including whether patients were new or returning, age, location, accessibility needs and other individual circumstances.
The interviews revisited the journey in much greater depth, exploring what helped patients feel prepared and confident, where uncertainty emerged, what they relied on for support and what they wished could have worked differently. Participants also discussed potential ways to improve support throughout their experience.
Add the perspective of the people patients already turned to for help
Interviews with 12 employees and volunteers who regularly helped patients navigate their visits added another perspective on the experience.
Their observations helped us compare patients' own accounts with the recurring questions and challenges encountered by the people already providing support.
Turn multiple research streams into an opportunity landscape
My final task was not simply to place the individual studies beside one another. I synthesized the existing research, survey findings, patient interviews and employee research into an integrated view of the experience.
The synthesis identified leading challenges across stages of the journey and meaningful differences across patients and locations. I developed six proto-personas and four patient journeys to make those differences easier for the team to understand and use, and organized potential starting points for addressing the leading challenges based on both the research and ideas patients themselves proposed.
Together, the research moved the team beyond a list of possible digital features toward a more grounded understanding of where patients needed additional support, what was driving those needs and which opportunities were worth exploring further.
What We Learned
1
The research confirmed that patients encountered questions, uncertainty and challenges at multiple stages surrounding their care. It also provided stronger evidence for where some of those needs were most pronounced, helping validate several areas the product team had already been considering for additional support.
But there wasn't one universal patient journey.
Experiences differed based on factors such as whether patients were new or returning, their age and circumstances, and which campus they visited. Patients who were already familiar with a location or process could approach the same experience very differently from someone encountering it for the first time.
Some needs suggested by earlier research also became less significant when examined through the new evidence. Patients were capable of managing certain parts of their time on campus independently, for example, even when previous research had suggested they might need more help.
Why it mattered: The team had evidence that additional support could provide value, but prioritization needed to account for who needed that support and under what circumstances, not simply whether a need appeared somewhere along the journey.
2
INFORMATION AVAILABLE ≠ CONFIDENCE ABOUT WHAT COMES NEXT
Patients received substantial information surrounding their visits, but having information didn't always mean knowing what to expect or feeling confident about what to do next.
That uncertainty could appear in different forms across the journey: preparing for an unfamiliar experience, understanding what would happen after arrival, determining the next step while on campus or knowing what to expect after leaving.
The interviews generated a large range of requests and ideas for making these experiences better. Looking across that feedback, however, showed that many individual suggestions pointed toward a broader underlying need: helping patients feel prepared, oriented and confident about what came next.
This also made some apparently simple opportunities more complex. A useful solution couldn't always provide another instruction or piece of information. It needed to account for what patients had already been told, what they understood, their familiarity with the experience and the context in which a question arose.
Why it mattered: The opportunity wasn't simply to provide patients with more information. Digital support needed to reduce uncertainty and help patients understand what information meant for their next step.
3
Looking holistically at the journey surfaced challenges well beyond the boundaries of a single product.
Patients identified opportunities involving communication, documentation, organizational processes, coordination and aspects of the care experience itself. Similar boundaries appeared even within stages where digital support seemed more directly applicable: sometimes the underlying issue belonged to a process, source of information or organizational group outside the product team's control.
A digital experience might help patients navigate some of those challenges, but it couldn't necessarily resolve their root causes.
That distinction became important when considering the large number of ideas generated through the research. A patient need could be real and important without automatically becoming a feature opportunity.
Why it mattered: The research helped distinguish between needs that digital assistance could meaningfully address, needs it might only partially support and broader experience problems requiring change elsewhere in the organization.
4
Across the research, patients consistently described positive interactions with the people who helped them throughout their experience. Employees and volunteers weren't merely a fallback when something failed; the reassurance, guidance and personal connection they provided were valuable parts of the experience themselves.
At the same time, people couldn't be available everywhere a patient might have a question. Patients could encounter uncertainty while preparing for a visit, moving through unfamiliar environments, transitioning between parts of their experience or after returning home.
That suggested a more deliberate role for digital assistance: provide useful support in moments when patients needed guidance but another person wasn't readily available, while being thoughtful about experiences where human interaction was already working well and deeply valued.
Why it mattered: The strongest opportunity wasn't to digitize as much of the journey as possible. It was to extend the reach of support into the gaps between human interactions without unnecessarily displacing the human experiences patients valued.
The Bigger Picture
The research didn't just identify opportunities. It helped define the boundaries of the opportunity.
Looking across the findings, it became clear that the opportunity space wasn't one undifferentiated backlog. Patient needs fell into meaningfully different categories depending on what role digital support could realistically play.
THE OPPORTUNITY FRAMEWORK
Not every patient need implied the same product response.
DIGITAL CAN MEANINGFULLY HELP
Extend guidance where support isn't readily available.
CONTEXT CHANGES THE NEED
Understand circumstances before defining a solution.
THE ROOT PROBLEM LIES ELSEWHERE
Digital may help patients navigate the issue without solving it.
THIS EXPERIENCE HAS VALUE ALREADY
Preserve effective independence or human support.
THE STRATEGIC DISTINCTION
A meaningful patient need isn't automatically a meaningful digital product opportunity.
The research provided a framework for making more deliberate choices: where digital assistance could add meaningful value, where greater complexity needed to be considered, where the root problem belonged elsewhere and where the best decision might be to preserve what was already working.
That reframed the opportunity:
The question was no longer simply “What could we build to support patients across the journey?” It became “Where can digital assistance meaningfully extend support, and where is digital not the whole answer?”
Influence & Outcomes
The research gave the team a shared foundation for evaluating current and future opportunities.
The program brought previously fragmented knowledge together with new quantitative and qualitative evidence, giving the team an integrated view of the experience across patients, locations and research methods.
The findings strengthened the evidence behind several opportunities the team had already been considering, challenged assumptions about others and clarified important differences among patients and campuses. The integrated findings, proto-personas and journeys gave the team a shared framework for understanding where needs were most pronounced and what context mattered when considering potential solutions.
Rather than treating every identified need as a product opportunity, the research helped distinguish where digital assistance could add value, where additional context or coordination was necessary and where broader experience challenges called for a different response.
My direct involvement concluded before later product prioritization and implementation, so I had limited visibility into subsequent decisions. What the research demonstrably provided was a stronger foundation for those decisions: a more grounded understanding of where patients needed support, how those needs differed and where digital assistance could (and could not) provide meaningful value.
Reflection
Research becomes more useful when teams have intentional opportunities to engage with the evidence.
What I'd carry forward is a more intentional approach to when and how teams engage with research. Strong evidence matters, but so do the opportunities for research and product partners to interpret it together. Those conversations can help connect what was learned with the decisions that follow.