Zorgkantoor Living Lab

A care office helps arrange long-term care (WLZ) for patients with severe mental disabilities or Alzheimer's disease, for example. The service process behind this is complex: IT challenges and politically imposed, often changing regulations make applying for this care a complicated and time-consuming process for family members and caregivers. And they are often already under great emotional pressure.

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Our assignment was to work with the Health Care Office to greatly shorten the customer journey from entry to delivering the right care. Something not easy in a complex landscape.

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Understanding exactly how a process works is crucial when it comes to service processes and healthcare innovation. That's why we worked according to the Living Lab method, which brings together service design and experiment design. We created a small living lab where we could learn "in real life" how the jointly designed new version of the intake process worked.

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We started with a service blueprint ("how does it work now") and a customer journey map ("what does the client experience"). By putting these together, we saw in one view how the process works, what the interaction is between clients, staff and IT systems and at the same time the journey the client makes through the service. In the subsequent phase, we designed the service delivery process as clients and the Care Agency would like to see it for themselves, without being bothered by "this can't be done" or "this is not allowed."

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Right after that, we went out into the real world. With a Living Lab team consisting of a care counselor, an administrative assistant and two of our experiment designers, we created a prototype of the, until now entirely paper and therefore error-prone, registration procedure. It became a digital intake form that at once replaced the twelve physical forms that clients normally have to fill out. ‍Clients then walked through the new intake process with their knowledge. Any indication of a change in procedure or prototype was noted immediately and, if possible, implemented the same day.

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In the Living Lab, we learned together in a short time how to make so-called "conscious choice conversations" about care again instead of administration. We learned how to set up the administration internally, so that the turnaround time of applications was immediately faster. We learned what the supporting digital processes should look like, an important question from the IT department. We learned about the crucial factor of language use. Several forms used complicated, ever-changing terms, laced with official WLZ jargon. From the first moment, therefore, we imposed on ourselves the requirement "everything in colloquial language." And so we could go on and on.

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In the final phase, we moved from one to more and more teams working according to the new process. This scaling allowed the Living Lab team to gather quantitative insights on process acceleration, impact on processing time and customer satisfaction. This allowed us to build the business case, crucial information for the Care Office management to justify decisions for investments in ICT, people and process changes.  

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