Radiology Imaging - Product Discovery Research

Why investigate in this feature?

The feature was added to the sprint backlog for implementation; however, the requirements were very ambiguous. There were only assumptions that this feature was important for our nurses and doctors, and that they wanted this feature on the platform.

To better understand the problem, I talked to the product team which helped me scope the goals for my research and any technical challenges that I may need to consider.

Why is this important to our users?

Centene works with Health Plan Providers across the United States. Depending on the states, and health plans, our nurses and doctors have different processes for accessing this radiology images. This may cause inconsistency and inefficiency for our users. For example, our nurses needed to navigate between our platform and a 3^rd party software to input information into our system. Additionally, it is not a cost-effective method to be licensing different software/services for each health plan.

Problem Statement

Hypothesized Solution

Business Benefits

Imaging currently lives in a 3^rd party system. How might we create a better and more efficient experience for nurses and doctors to access radiology images within Centene’s platform?

"Based on the key findings, it is my recommendation to not implement this feature because there isn't a user need to view radiology imaging & scans on Centene's platform."

Integrated imaging feature that would allow nurses and doctors to view radiology images within Centene’s main platform.

With an integrated & universal feature within Centene’s platform for all our health plans, this would allow the company to minimize licensing costs (One service provider vs multiple).

After the initial planning, I reached out to different health plans in Texas, California, Florida, and Ohio. Because we knew nothing about the 3^rd party software that is being used right now, I had a very broad range of users that I needed to interview.

Research Goals:

• What is this 3^rd party software?
• What roles/personas need to access this software for radiology imaging services?
• What/Where in the process do users need to access this feature?

Key Findings

• Centene’s nurses / users do not authorize radiology services because it requires special licensing. This means that they do not need this feature because they don’t need to view this radiology related information.
• Centene currently has a 3^rd party provider that provides all services that need special licensing because licensing is expensive to obtain for Centene.

Key Takeaways:

• It may have felt like a waste of time and resources to be doing this research because there was no “deliverable”. I thought this was an interesting and valuable experience for me. The research helped me understand that the outcome of a discovery research is not about producing an output, but to identify and understand the underlying problem.
  
• It was very interesting to me that the way I framed the research was to understand how I wanted to design this feature, why users needed this feature, and where they wanted to access it. My expectations were to discover requirements for a feature, but it was really trying to pin-point the right problems to focus on.
• Discovery research is valuable! Had this not been done, the team could’ve wasted a lot of resources heading into development to implement something that the users didn’t need.

Surprise Findings

From the interviews, I discovered an unexpected, but interesting issue that was wasting hours, if not days, of time for our nurses. There is currently a long wait for nurses to retrieve clinical documents due to how they’re being delivered. This caused frustrations for nurses when they could’ve spent time helping other patients. I presented this surprise finding to the team so that it can be investigated and addressed.