Improving the Medical Testing Experience

Improving the in-person experience for medical testing clinics across British Columbia and Ontario.

Client
Life Labs

Design Team
Made Manifest

Project Type
User Research, Strategy, Prototyping and Testing

The Challenge:

Life Labs is the largest provider of medical testing in the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, with hundreds of in-person testing clinics across both provinces. For the past few years, Made Manifest has done several projects with them to improve their service delivery to patients. These projects included:

  • Understanding the current state experience for patients engaging with Life Labs services

  • Ensuring greater access to medical test results and education

  • Improving the in-person health clinic experience, including designing a service training module for staff

  • Prototyping and testing a new appointment booking experience for both in-person and online booking

  • Supporting the deployment and testing of Point of Care Testing pilots for long-term care homes

The Outcome:

This multi-year relationship with Life Labs has resulted in over 6 separate user research studies (speaking to over 70 participants across BC and Ontario. These insights helped Life Labs better understand their patients’ behaviours and motivations and informed the development of over a dozen prototypes for testing. Some of these prototypes include:: online patient portal, a new appointment booking process and online system, new service training modules for staff, and a new patient waiting room experience. Currently, we are supporting the deployment and testing of Point of Care Testing machines within long-term care homes to gauge if it reduces emergency room transfers and provides patients with better care.

The Approach:

All projects with Life Labs undergo an initial user research study and an extensive desk which then help to inform the development and design of a prototype which then gets tested with patients or healthcare providers. The process is highly collaborative and typically involves subject matter experts, frontline staff and patients.

Project Methodology

In-Depth Interviews

Over the course of multiple projects, Made Manifest engaged over 70 patients to better understand their experiences with Life Lab services. This ranged from understanding how they perceived the organization, their experience getting their blood drawn, and how they booked their appointments. Insights were synthesized and presented to senior managers to help inform future roadmapping and prototype development.

Prototype Testing

After conducting user research, the insights gathered were used as inputs into the development of rough prototypes that were tested with patients. For example, I designed a set of storyboards to gain an understanding of a patient’s experience booking an appointment with Life Labs, whether through a direct referral from their healthcare provider, a walk-in patient or through an online booking portal. The storyboards helped me validate any hypothesis I had regarding the order of steps a user may take when booking an appointment, as well as informing the key features needed for a digital and in-person appointment booking experience.

Outcomes

Key findings in this ongoing, multi-year engagement with Life Labs resulted in some of the following:

  • A greater understanding of Life Labs patients and revealed how patients perceive and utilize Life Lab’s services.

  • The need to increase access to digital medical records that include education to help patients advocate for their health with their providers (this is particularly needed for patients living in rural areas, where Life Labs is the only access to medical support and advice they have). 

  • Improvements to the Life Labs digital portal, in-person waiting room experience and online appointment booking system-- all of which help to increase access to healthcare for residents across British Columbia and Ontario.

In addition to improvements made to the patient experience, Life Labs and Made Manifest are currently engaged in a multi-phase pilot for point-of-care testing in long-term care homes. The pilot engages 10 long-term care homes across southern Ontario and is gathering information on how these devices could be deployed effectively, if they have any impact on service delivery, improve the quality of life for patients, and help decrease emergency room transfers. Made Manifest is leading the pilot research by gathering feedback from pilot participants, conducting desk research on previous tests, synthesizing findings and reporting insights which will impact the design of a Point of Care Testing service offered by Life Labs.