Microsoft: Health Collaborative
Helping patients build stronger primary-care relationships
Context
Enhancing existing healthcare tools.
Patients value trusted and emotionally engaged relationships with providers, especially beyond routine visits. But systemic pressures for efficiency often compromise this. In collaboration with service designers at Microsoft, we reimagined the care journey within the current system to support trust, communication, and continuity for both patients and providers.
🏆 This project was awarded the Innovation Award at the 2023 HCDE Master's Capstone Showcase!
Service Designer & Researcher
2 Designers, 1 Researcher, 1 Engineer
Sponsored by: Microsoft
Jan 2023 - Jun 2023 (6 months)
Desk research, in-depth interviews, ideation, co-design, affinity diagram, journey map, prototype
The Problem
Patients want to collaborate with their providers, but short appointments, low patient advocacy, and gaps in emotional support leaves them feeling frustrated.
Challenge
"The emotional connection can be just as important as the medical side."
- Patient Participant
Our Solution
A service that enhances patient-provider connections by complementing existing healthcare tools with emotional, educational, and logistical support.
We leveraged service design principles including: journey mapping, interviews, and co-design workshops to design a healthcare experience where patients feel genuinely supported. By centering empathy and mutual understanding, the solution builds lasting trust between patients, providers, and institutions.
Featured service touchpoint prototypes across the care journey:
Pre-Appointment
Onboarding Survey
Survey includes things that the patient's provider need to be aware of:
Care strategy
Communication methods
Special accommodations
Continuing Care
Care Check-In
Supporting patients in the gap between appointments, they are able to report the status of their treatment and any changes they want to adopt.
Pre-Appointment
Appointment Assistance
Helping patients scope their needs and make the most out of the short appointment times. This gives room to direct their care and bring up concerns.
Continuing Care
Care Timeline
Allowing patients and providers to stay on the same page:
Patients are able to see exactly where they are in their healthcare process
Providers are able to see how a patient is doing when they are seeing outside providers / testing centers.
Outcome
Centering human values for lasting impact.
By leading with human-centered values, we created impact that patients could feel throughout our concept:
Feeling Genuinely Cared For
Made patients feel heard, valued, and cared for as unique individuals
Stronger Patient-Provider Connection
Brought patients and providers closer together through empathy and understanding
Empowered Self-Advocacy
Enabled patients to advocate for themselves and stay in control of their care
Quality Care From The Heart
Improved the perceived quality of care by addressing emotional needs
Research
Understanding the current healthcare system, its actors, and their values.
Literature Review
30+ Journal Articles
User Interviews
8 Patients
SME Interviews
7 Providers
We divided our research into two phases to build both a broad and focused understanding of the problem space. In the first phase, we reviewed over 30 journal articles to explore the healthcare landscape and identify areas within the system that are often overlooked. This helped us develop an ecosystem map and a service blueprint to visualize how different stakeholders and systems interact.
In the second phase, we narrowed our focus to patients with chronic illnesses – a group we identified as having a significant impact on the healthcare system and requiring more comprehensive support. We conducted interviews with 8 patients and 7 subject matter experts. We synthesized the insights from these conversations, which informed the creation of personas, journey maps, and early design concepts.
Some artifacts created after research: Ecosystem map, high-level patient flowchart, and current state patient journey map.
Insights
Share Values: Collaboration and education are important for both patients and providers.
Patients want to be able to direct their care and approach healthcare like a partnership
Providers need to feel confident that patients accept their care strategy and know how to follow through
Patient
Collaboration
"I want my doctor to be a very interested listener and show up like my partner. I like to look at various pathways, and we choose the pathway together."
Education
"[Doing my own research] made me feel like I was doing something… and being able to play one aspect of it was nice – even if it was ultimately not that impactful."
Provider
Collaboration
"The patients that we tend to love working with are patients who are trying to collaborate as much as possible with us and move the coaching skills at home home."
Education
"When patients don't understand, we write things down on the board in a picture way which is more helpful when explaining technical terms."
Value Tensions: The healthcare system's constraints towards optimization make personalized, quality care hard to achieve.
Personas
The divide in how patients approach healthcare.
Healthcare is a broad and varied experience, with patients of different background and intersectionality. We intentionally limited ourselves to two personas and going more in-depth based on our primary research to help guide our design exploration.
◉ Target user for this case study
Collaborative Cora is likely to spend more time and money in the healthcare system over the long term – yet she is also the most dissatisfied with her experience.
Ideation
Creating space for people to shape their own solutions.
We facilitated a co-design workshop that brought together both patients and healthcare providers to reimagine the ideal patient-partner relationship. Participants began by individually brainstorming their needs and expectations, then worked together to organize their ideas into affinity diagrams. This process surfaced 43 unique concepts.
From there, participants voted on their top 3 themes, which became the foundation for collaborative solution-building in mixed patient-provider pairs. Their favorite ideas included:
Empathy training for providers to better understand the lived experiences of people with chronic illness
A three-way messaging system connecting patients, primary care providers, and specialists for more coordinated communication
Conversation guides for appointments that support deeper, more meaningful dialogue – beyond the standard checklist
The co-design workshop in action.
Design
Service concepts
Building on ideas from our co-design workshop and incorporating feedback from service designers at Microsoft, we developed and refined several service concepts.
With encouraging feedback from our Microsoft collaborators, we further detailed how these solutions would function across key touchpoints. In addition to journey maps, an ecosystem map, and service blueprints to communicate the experience, we created an interactive prototype that brought both digital and physical elements of the service.
Some deliverables of the project: An interactive prototype, physical patient conversation guide, and empathy cards for providers.
Key Learnings
Designing for diverse user groups with shared experiences:
By involving both patients and providers in our research and design process, we showed that it's not only possible, but essential to create healthcare solutions that serve all stakeholders together, rather than treating them separately.
Growing as an empathetic designer:
This project pushed us beyond our comfort zones and deepened our empathy. It taught us to recognize our own privileges, listen more carefully, and design with greater responsibility – especially in high-stakes spaces like healthcare.
