How One Human-Centered Design Can Heal the Emotional Scars of 18 Million+ Health Care Workers

“The pandemic changed everything…”

🔎 Research Categories: Generative & Evaluative

🕵️‍♀️ Role: UX Researcher/Strategist

⚙️ Process:

  • User & Stakeholder Interviews

  • Interview Screener & Discussion Guide

  • Secondary Research

  • Competitive Analysis

  • Stakeholder Mapping

  • Affinity Mapping

  • User Matrix

  • User Journey

  • User Persona

  • Low- and High-Fidelity Wireframes

  • Prototyping

✨ Impact:

  • Identified a 1 billion dollar opportunity for an untapped market of 18 million+ health care workers in the U.S. coping with stress, burnout and increased churn rate

  • Research informed MVP direction, design & roadmap

🤝 Cross-functional & Stakeholder Collaboration: UX, Product, Business, Engineering

Background

According to the Office of U.S. Surgeon General, health care worker stress & burnout has increased significantly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.*

“Standing there, holding the door closed so that 3 year-old  couldn’t come out of her COVID isolation room…..hearing her cry for her mom, who couldn’t be there……

It’s like, in that exact moment,  a piece of my heart died…..how can this be real?”

Problem

This negative impact on health care workers as individuals has had deep systemic and societal consequences.  

Hypothesis

Providing mental health support tailored to the specific needs of health care workers will decrease anxiety, depression and substance use; mitigate workforce shortages and employee retention challenges; and improve patient care and health outcomes.

"This was hard before but after all these years of COVID…..how much longer can I do this?"

So, how might we get health care workers the support they need to care for themselves and us all?

Solution

This 24/7/365 on-call support hotline app for health care workers, by health care workers, provides support from a peer who’s been through what you’re going through, who “understands” in a way that other people can’t. 

There’s an inherent bond, a shared language between the former ICU nurse who now works for “Can You Talk,” and the OR tech who needs a listening ear at 3 AM after a really stressful work experience.

High Level Research Objectives

  • Learn about the current state of health care workers’ mental health

  • Identify strengths and gaps in the current market

  • Uncover user needs and pain points

Discovery Research

Through desk research, I discovered that:

  1. Studies show increased risk of suicide, burnout and intent-to-leave health care professions.

  2. Questions about mental health or substance use treatment on some licensing and credentialing applications make health care workers hesitant to pursue treatment due to concern for loss of employment.  

  3. Many “tool kits” for hospital employers to support employees have been developed, but there is little-to-no information demonstrating impact.

"There’s a lot of talk about [the concept] of burnout, but there's no action, no good system for preventing it, addressing it."

Competitive Analysis

Through competitive analysis, I identified several deficits pointing to opportunities to address gaps in the current market:

  •  Few resources specifically for health care workers; also, any existing resources are often restricted to specific subsets (e.g. nursing support group). 

  • Immediately available support is specifically for crisis situations, like suicidal ideation, whereas there’s always some kind of waiting period to access non-crisis support.

  • Lack of opportunities for peer support.

  • Almost no services provide the option for anonymity.

Interviews

Utilizing stakeholder mapping to inform the interview recruitment process, I then created discussion guides tailored to primary, secondary and tertiary users/stakeholders.

I conducted 7 interviews to explore:

  • What is a typical day like for a health care worker?

  • What stressors do they experience?

  • What support strategies do they benefit from? 

  • Are there specific needs that aren’t being met?

“Health care workers, we're really hard on ourselves...we do a serious job with serious consequences."

Stakeholder Mapping

Interview Notes

Analysis of Findings 

Affinity Mapping

“A great calling to take care of people who aren’t well.”

Key Themes

  • Health care workers feel an inherent desire to take care of others, but also want to feel taken care of, themselves. 

  • They don’t feel valued or supported by hospital employers.

  • They gain comfort from relationship-based support (co-workers, family, friends, therapists, mentors).

There’s a lot of ‘we appreciate you’ from the hospital [administration], but it feels like empty words.”

“We [co-workers] rely on each other for support.”

Pain Points 

  • Don’t feel employer support offerings are dependable; meaningful; or compatible with health care workers’ true needs. 

  • Experience friction accessing mental health support:

    • Long wait times for professional mental health support

    • Scheduling Challenges

    • Concern for impact on employment

  “No follow through on support offered at work- it's insulting."

Research Synthesis

User Matrix

Cross-referencing stress level with receptiveness to support, we identified the “Weary,” whose established coping strategies and support systems are no longer adequate enough to address their increased stress level, as our target early adopters.

User Matrix

User Journey

We built current state & future state maps to inform the design process:

Current State

Future State

User Persona 

Mona is a hospital social worker who has wanted to work in health care ever since she was little. She loves that she gets to support patients and families, but the COVID pandemic has really taken a toll on her. She knows that if she doesn’t get more support soon, she won’t have the emotional bandwidth she needs to keep doing this work.

Persona

Recommendations

  • A B2C direct-to-health care worker product would be faster to create & market, and have a higher success rate of engaging users than a B2B venture (e.g. Calm or Headspace-like corporate accounts for employers to offer as an employee benefit) due to health care worker perception of lack of support from employers.

  • Product requirements should be developed with this user group’s need for support that’s compatible with the fluidity inherent to the health care work environment in mind:

  • Explore incorporating person-to-person or peer-to-peer support that is already part of health care workers’ support network mental model.

Portable

Flexible

Reliable

Option for Anonymity

Concept & Design Iteration

I partnered with cross functional teams to incorporate research findings and insights into designing an MVP solution.  We originally envisioned a product that offered many options for stress relief.  However, with each iteration we asked ourselves, “does this truly fulfill our users’ core needs and solve their pain points?”  Eventually, that led to our refined MVP, a peer support app called Can You Talk?

Research Impact

  • Nurtured cross-functional team’s empathy by “humanizing” the user.

  • Uncovered important design guidelines.

  • User interview quote inspired app name (Can You Talk?).

  • Established a clearer product vision & roadmap to hook investors with a particular affinity for health care or mental health-related opportunities.

  • Identified marketing pathways, e.g. leveraging the finding that health care workers often pursue products or services based on peer recommendations.

  • Created a research repository to refer to throughout the product development cycle.

Reflections & Learnings:

  • Many emotional stories and moments came up during the interviews.  If and when additional researchers onboard, they should receive the trauma-informed research training that has been vital to my own career.

  • The emotional trauma from the pandemic runs deep for health care workers, and no solution is one size fits all.  It would be worthwhile to continue exploring product concepts for future growth opportunities.

* All information source material available upon request