Thing 14: Clearer Patient Flow in Medical Settings

I'm hoping my recent extensive involvement with medicine as a patient is drawing to a close, for now; but it has certainly made me think more about interaction and facility design in medicine than I had before.

I should say upfront that I had a very good experience, over all; in all of the inning and outing of hospitals and imaging labs and doctors' offices, everyone was very kind, helpful, and appropriate. It was apparently a tricky situation, which now (knock wood!) seems to be on the mend due to the diligence and knowledge of all the medical-type peeps involved. So kudos and thanks to them.

However. The institutions housing these medical-type peeps all seem to have different interaction models--some of them run everything out of registration, some seem to register only for admitting patients, some I haven't figured out yet--and at no time does anybody tell the patient: Here at this office we use Medical Interaction Model 2. This means that when you come here, you should always go to the registration office first, no matter what you're here for. I'm sure from the other side of the desk it's perfectly obvious what the patient should do, but particularly when you've encountered a wide variety of different interaction models in a short period of time, from the patient side it's bloody confusing.

So here's what I want from medical offices: Clarify what you want me to do! If I need to go to registration, then go up to the health center, then to the outpatient lab for the end goal of getting blood work done, don't tell me to come in and get my blood drawn unless you know I've done that at this location for a very similar reason before. On a simpler level, when you visit a doctor's office and you're ready to leave, sometimes you stop at the reception window on the way out (new appointment? other arrangements? pay copay?) and sometimes you don't. That moment of hesitation--where am I supposed to be, and what am I supposed to be doing?--seems minimal and tolerable, until you experience it and its nasty cousin (being in the wrong place or without the right paperwork) repeatedly.

One solution requires no added hardware at all, just a little more talking on the part of the nurse, or whoever the final point of contact is: ask if the patient has done this before, explain what the different steps are. Simple, but tiresome for the nurses over many repetitions. A more elegant solution for a hospital or medical campus that would take much longer to implement is some kind of hardware (phone app? museum-style personal guide device?) that knows what the end medical goal is and what the intermediate steps are. Less time is wasted going to the incorrect place, and patients feel less like they've been abandoned in the middle of a rabbit warren with no particular indication what the next step ought to be.

I'm not satisfied with either of these solutions--maybe in tandem they would be acceptable--but what I want to happen is clarified interaction flow in medical settings; the basic patient question "Where am I supposed to be next, and what do I need when I get there?" should be anticipated and provided for more thoughtfully.