This is a students project, while I was at the University of Applied Sciences in Oulu in Finland(OAMK).

You can find a method which will help you doing Service Design.

In here are papers which help you thinking, called canvases. Those are based on Lean Service Creation, but adapted for the healthcare sector. That means, that we left out some business part and rephrased some headlines.

Since it was a project in Finland, you will find some Finnish translation in there.

C.A.R.E stands for Communicate, Adjust, Respect and Empower.

Communicate to each other, but especially to your users.

Adjust your service, so users feel good using your service.

Respect that people are different and that there is no perfect service.

Empower your employees to solve problems and improve the service on their own.

Why do we focus on healthcare? Lean Service Creation is used in Business and IT. It is common there, because the thinking and methodologies are very common.

In healthcare many companies, especially hospitals, have strict and large hierarchies. That make changes very hard and slow. When end-users are unhappy, they complain to the employees who have no way to change how the service is offered and also have no way to communicate the feedback.

The management either tries to improve their service on their own knowledge or hire other companies who should then improve the service, the company is offering.

But what about the employees who work daily with the user? They can gather feedback instantly and see how users feel. With our method, you should gather some people from different hierarchies in your company and tackle problems which make your service not as good as you want it to be. Together you will find out ways and you can test those changes easily with low costs.

We offer 3 phases: Research, Ideation and Prototyping.

In the research phase it is all about the problem. Any problem of any kind. This means, you should not think of a solution yet, this is not your time so far.

Figure out why it is a problem, where the origin comes from, what harm it does. Figure out how people deal with it.

Most important, interview your users, ask what they feel, what they experience and what they hope for.

When do you have done enough research? The problem is most of the time something different than you thought of. When you interviewed enough users, you will know what you can improve, you will have evidence for that.

Please keep in mind, that you should never work upon assumptions. Whenever you think, you don't know enough about a topic, go back to the research phase and find out more.

When you have done enough research, you should have one specific problem you want to tackle. Now is your time to come up with ideas. Come up with things which either solve only a little part of the problem or the big thing. Be creative, be crazy, think of ways which will never be possible in real life. That will help you and others with brainstorming and thinking of things, which are indeed possible.

When you have enough ideas, develop at least 3 services in detail. Rate and compare each idea and pick the best fitting one for the prototyping phase.

Welcome to the last phase.

Test your prototype, see what your users say. Adjust the details and test them again and again.

Make your users happy.

Annika Forschle
Alexander Kubsch
Thanh Truc Nguyen
Rojal Rajkarnikar
Samip Dhungel Upadhya
Kevin Watzal
Sophia Zehetmair