The client, M&P Radiology (2012), now Pavía Breast & Imaging Center, is a high-end technology and healthcare service provider concentrated in cancer prevention.
They wanted to audit their communication skills regarding patients and their doctors.
We inquired for 12 months from multiple aspects due to the complexity that healthcare environments bring. This was an environmental and service design project.
The goal was to evaluate the readability and intelligibility of communication services offered to patients and their doctors, and the interaction between members of the staff of M & P Radiology through a complex contextual research. The findings determined design executions and adjustments as an interlocutor tool to address the healthcare, medication and human interaction with technology.
The doctors voiced us their concern regarding the challenges addressing dissemination and education of health issues and of effective disease treatments. In the current context of Puerto Rico, and due to various factors including economic depression, medicine has been adversely impacted by unethical practices. In addition, healthcare in Puerto Rico has also been affected by advertising and marketing, which add axiological concerns regarding efficient education and communication of healthcare matters. Rubberband recognizes the opportunity to build bridges of communication (communication design) between public health professionals and patients, as well as the fuzzy aspects of the conflicts of interest in regard to the mission of doctors and the general economic landscape.
Immersion tools were used for designers to understand the process of patients undergoing medical tests, and these were paired with long studies of the observations of both doctors and technicians that were then evaluated from the perspective of design, using activity theory. The same process was conducted with the patients.
The findings of these studies and exercises were synthesized in a Giga-map format for the clients and their staff to more easily understand the different factors affecting their communication with their patients.
