Creating new health services for the insured
Service design | User Research


Working closely with the client’s internal service design team, I was asked to help them, on one hand with the digital transformation of their health insurance claim processes, in order to give private users full independence with their claims. On the other hand, I was asked to design new extra insurance policy services for uninsured pathologies that could nevertheless help clients coping with them.
Services
Service design; User research; Concept development
Client
Private insurance company
Challenges
The two separate scopes of my intervention called for two very different challenges to tackle.
When working on the digital transformation of the client's insurance claim processes, the main difficulties at hand concerned the managing of the structural complexity they were embedded in.
From a purely user journey perspective, in fact, the processes seemed quite simple and uneventful. However, when those same processes are viewed from a technical and organisational perspective, matters changed quite rapidly.
The development of the concept for the new health services was a whole different story.
The scope of this section of the project focused on a set of very different pathologies, namely: diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity, hypertension and oncologic diseases.
Given the different natures of each, the main challenge in this case was to come up with a scalable solution that could be tailored to each pathology and its peculiarity, giving clients tangible benefits and support, while staying outside the services that could be given through a real insurance policy.


Approach
As per the first topic, most of the efforts were thus spent on conducting multiple interview sessions with all stakeholders involved in the processes at hand, trying to come up with them with the best solution that would grant the best user experience available at the moment for clients and service providers both.
After having come up with an ideal customer journey, I moved on to dissect its each and every step with the client's various internal teams to initially map out exactly which individuals, what technologies, which systems and what efforts they entailed.
Once that was finally clear, the next step was to, together with the rest of the client's service and strategic team, identify which elements to prioritise to develop in the immediate future and which others should instead be pushed to a later improved release.
For the extra policy health services instead, much of my time was spent on dissecting all the first hand experiences I could get my hands on of people suffering of one of more of the selected pathologies, so to grasp a hint of their real needs and wishes.
The findings were then summarised into different pathology identikits, through which three main recurring themes emerged: what clients suffering from the identified pathologies seemed to have in common were wishes and needs for more mental support, guidance through a pathology tailored lifestyle, financial support for specific medical checkups and, for some pathologies, support in buying monitoring devices.