After completing our research, we each spent time individually ideating before coming together to develop a final solution.

 

I chose to focus on the following pain points:

• Gender expansive patients feel disempowered by the medical community due to fear of harassment and discrimination.

• Hospital administration has no efficient way to manage or address patient feedback, hold providers accountable, or track the organization's progress towards being a more inclusive space.

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I was primarily interested in addressing the lack of trust between gender expansive patients and the healthcare industry. In order to make Langone more inclusive, we must first contend with a history of unequal, violent, and life-threatening experiences that they have had to face within the larger system. Through my initial research, I discovered that one aspect of the hospital experience that perpetuates patient fear is the unequal power dynamic between patients and providers. Often, patients are reluctant to speak up for themselves or voice discomfort in front of their healthcare provider which can lead to serious problems.

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Thus, I identified two design opportunities:

1. How might we create a neutral meeting point between patient and provider?

2. How might we build a sense of community for gender expansive patients within the hospital network?

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These opportunities work hand in hand to empower gender expansive patients and create a more supportive institutional culture at Langone.

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Working off of these two questions, I designed a holistic solution that could be packaged as a hospital-wide campaign. The campaign would include a completely redesigned patient feedback system, a gender expansive speaker series, and queer friendly branding. The speaker series would include a mechanism for input and organizing from patients themselves. Trust is built through listening and active engagement, so the hospital should look to empower its patients.

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Patient Feedback System

The current complaint system at Langone is only available by phone or in their office, Monday through Friday 9 AM to 5 PM. There is no email address or online interface. Furthermore, all feedback specific to the queer community is funneled to one person, the LGBTQ+ Patient Liason, who is often overwhelmed.

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There are several issues with this, including:

• Gender expansive patients may not be comfortable complaining through the phone or face to face with a staff member due to fear of retaliation or harassment.

• Long wait times may deter them from submitting feedback.

• There is no efficient way to track the outcome of complaints or hold people accountable.

• The complaint system is not specific to the gender expansive community, so staff members may not know how to best respond to their complaints.

• There is no option to collect positive feedback or track what the hospital does well.

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The new patient feedback system would include both physical and digital touchpoints and would create an efficient hand-off system for queer and gender expansive patient feedback by partnering with Langone's existing LGBTQ+ Advisory Council. Feedback would thus feed into an internal ticketing system where the patient relations team can more easily and efficiently respond to issues. An important feature of this internal system is that, if a feedback form references a specific provider, the ticket feeds into a provider database that displays all of the tickets related to that provider. This would allow hospital administration to aggregate feedback into useful metrics and track how well (or how poorly) hospital staff is doing in terms of respecting their patients’ gender identity and providing a consistent level of comfort.

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Finally, Mingjing had the idea to create a metric dashboard based on the patient feedback system that provides anonymized data to the public, so that the community can track NYU Langone’s progress. The feedback system is thus structure as a four step cycle as illustrated below.