Making Health Care a Little Easier

Client: Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare

Situation: Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare wanted to refine its growth strategy in the context of its very competitive, increasingly regulated market. It wanted to identify opportunities to differentiate itself from its competition by enhancing the customer’s experiences throughout the value chain.

Strategy: Conduct a voice of the customer study to explore the experiences, values, and needs of key constituents. Provide multiple views of customer experiences throughout the value chain in order to identify needs that cut across all stakeholders. Prioritize overlapping needs as targets for system-wide innovation.

Tactics: Innovare conducted a Vocal Insights exploratory among physicians, nurse practitioners, healthcare facility management, and patients. The study was conducted at physicians’ offices, in health clinics, and in health center administrative offices. We studied patients with a wide range of healthcare needs, ages, and family compositions. The physicians ranged from high-end specialists associated with leading teaching hospitals to family physicians in economically challenged locations.

We facilitated the client team through our immersion process instilling an empathic understanding about their customers’ experiences and creating a knowledge foundation across the team that enabled strategy formulation.

Results: Vocal Insights uncovered a wide range of friction points that became the central focus for system-wide innovation. Those insights helped senior management create a new vision and strategy. "Making great health care a little easier" became their new tag line and captures the essence of their innovation efforts to enhance the experiences of both patients and practitioners.

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