Empathy In Healthtech
What about the clinicians?
The older I get the more I believe that empathy can be a learned skill.
Empathy in its basic form is the ability to understand the why?
Why do they feel a certain way?
Why did they do that?
It should not be mistaken for sympathy which is just having an emotional reaction to an event. Yes, you may feel bad for someone, but you don’t understand why.
Why are we talking about empathy? It is because empathy is the core tenant of creating a solution. If you can’t empathize with your users, you can’t create a viable solution. If you talk to any User Experience (UX) designer and ask them what the most important part of their job is, most of them will reply with “Empathy.” The good ones understand that all the window dressing and the cool animations are worth nothing if you do not understand why the user is doing what they are doing.
Learning empathy
So how do you learn empathy? There is only one way to do that. It is to go out and talk to people. Ask them why they are doing what they are doing. Experience what they are experiencing.
This is what is lacking in healthtech in my opinion. Many companies have started with great intentions trying to solve a problem they have faced or a loved one has faced but are not looking at the whole picture. Healthcare can’t be treated like tech where you create SAAS solutions and expect people to adopt them on their own. Hopefully, one day we can get there but we are very far away from that.
Let me help you empathize
I am going to try to explain the why with some common issues that patients experience.
Wait times in the clinic
We all hate waiting at the doctor’s office. I can tell you with great certainty the doctor is not just sitting in his room watching Netflix waiting until they are 30 mins late to your appointment. What is happening is a regular checkup turned into an hour-and-a-half-long affair because their labs are all out of whack and you need to get them admitted to the hospital ASAP.
At the same time, they are being paged from the hospital about one of their patients that has some critical labs. Then they walk into the next patient’s room and that runs over another 15 minutes. If you are doing the math we are already hour plus wait.
Then there is a frantic call from the patient that insurance is denying their claim and they are asking for peer-to-peer review that only the doctor can do and the insurance company gives you a certain time to call them.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t even touched on delays with labs, patients showing up late or too early, same-day add-ons, refill requests…the list goes on and on.
Insurance issues
We are as clueless as you are most of the time. We did not call the insurance company and ask them to deny your coverage.
We filled out, what we thought was, the proper paperwork by hand and faxed it to your insurance company only to find out 2 weeks later that we didn’t fill out the right form.
Health insurance is even more complex for us, and we can’t know the intricacies of the different plans. One plan prefers one drug over the other. The other plan doesn’t approve the standard of care without a conversation.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell how much something will cost because we don’t know how much we charge. We would love to make this all a seamless experience but we also stay on hold with the insurance company for hours.
Follow up
We would love to follow up with every single patient but we don’t have the time or the staff to do it. Many times we walk into a clinic and have an answering machine full of messages before we even start our day. Then we are triaging the problems of the patients being seen that day as well. Most of us stay late to complete all of our work because we were just putting out fires all day.
Seeing patients in the hospital
Depending on how the hospital operates they might have hospitalists. These are doctors that are employed by the hospital to see the patients in that specific hospital. These people are overworked. They are responsible for the whole hospital and they see the sickest patients first. They can’t clone themselves and be everywhere all at once. They would love to see everyone promptly and quickly so they can go home at a reasonable time to see their family and friends but, the nature of patients being in the hospital is that they are very sick and need extra care and attention. And since they are seeing so many different patients they are constantly being paged about them. It is very hard to do a job when you are constantly being interrupted.
Your surgeon isn’t avoiding you. They have been in surgery from 7 AM until 7 PM. They thought they were going to be able to step away for a couple of hours and see their patients but there was a car accident and they need to go into emergency surgery right now! So they run back to the operating room stuffing their mouth with the sandwich they just bought because they haven’t eaten all day.
Empathize with both the patient and the clinicians
In design, you are empathizing with the user. In healthcare, we empathize with our patients. They both look at the user’s journey and try to make it easier. Somewhere along the way that was lost in healthcare. To fix healthcare we need to bring back empathy. We need to dissect every journey the provider AND patient go through and make it better.
If your solution does not have the clinicians in mind when creating the solution then your solution will not last very long. Who do you think will onboard the majority of the patients? Who do you think will walk them through your solution?
The clinician for those who don’t know.
This is why it is very important to have a clinician or at least someone with a medical background as part of your early decision-making team. The reason for this is we can provide you with a broader picture. This matched with the passion of the other founder makes a recipe for something amazing!
The road in healthcare is a long one and will not be easy, but small steps lead to large distances over time. Together we can create the changes we need.
Thank you so much for your support! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or leave a comment.
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I hope you have a great day!