IBM Watson Health UX Research for Watson Care Manager

(Dublin, Ireland)

IBM Watson Health is a department dedicated to work on health solutions.
They strive to enable healthcare workers to derive more insights from their data and simplify their operations, helping their organizations to become more efficient, resilient and robust institutions.

Dublin Watson Health department is heavily focused on Government related solutions. IBM Watson Care Manager is one of the main solutions developed in Ireland.
In a nutshell IBM Watson Care Manager optimizes care management through individualized care plans that manage the whole person and engage the community.
It's a product created for years in conjunction with customers in US and Europe.

The design team consists of experienced T shaped designers who work together on this solution for more than half a decade.
The product is large and rigid and requires a lot of design effort.

More official information about Watson Care Manager is available here.

Upon joining Watson Health I was presented with a challenge to lead reseach for Watson Care Manager Individual Engagament.
Harrow County in London UK, decided to sign up for Watson Care Manager solution and required specific work.
I combined my regular research efforts with new customer focused research. Full official IBM and Harrow collaboration story can be found here.

My role

I was tasked with a research lead role for and worked on AI/Watson Solution for Harrow Council Watson Care Manager IBM Watson Health. As the latest addition to Watson Health team I was asked to use IBM Design Research to prove or discredit my team’s collective assumptions about offering’s outcome, connect users, product owners and design team. Drive actionable user insights. Build continuous knowledge, discovery, and empathy. Understand through empirical observation, experience, and making.

My work process

Considering that real customers are using this application I ran a series of research excersises from inhouse proxy testing to actual customer testing.
• I lead the scoping, planning, and execution of research
• Facilitate research synthesis and frame insights to reframe business challenges
• Translate insights into artifacts and frameworks that illustrate the intersection of customer experience and business opportunity and inspire ideation
• And more • All while working with a degree of ambiguity and scope of flexibility to experiment within a design thinking framework

What did I inherit?

Watson Care Manager is a mature and successful application with engaged customers, established design, development and product teams working on their solutions for years.

Harrow council had A functional well established My Community ePurse (MCeP) personal budget management solution.
All sides however wanted to understand their end users true motivation and needs and welcomed research.
However, having said that large applications can take time to implement the changes they want to.

What did I do?

Apart from setting up research field trips and design thinking workshops in London, Harrow Council I created a number of research assets tailored to support and guide teams.
• I created personas,
• hills,
• user segmentation models,
• user journeys,
• playbacks,
• wrote scripts,
• set up interviews with live users,
• conducted and synthesised interviews,
• supported research implementation in design.

Results

Understanding user

Please note this work is NDA protected.

• Who is our user and what are their As-Is journey? Completed research and validation
• What are their painpoins, needs? What the To-Be we must create to solve their problems? Research and validation

It is important to build long lasting relationships with users and drive ongoing research. Products can take years to build and ideally we should have a good relationship and feedback loop with our end users. for this reason I organised reserch trips and build sponsor, reoccuring user base.
• Organising research trips, design workshops
• Building test user base relevant to personas. Tapping into user base to validate assumptions.
• User testing via demo, interviews and interactive sessions
• Determining success and setting up Analytics for KPI's

Watson Health application and product design falls under corporate brand guides. These guides are followed closely and consistent visual designs are produced for all Watson Health related applications.

Better health, lower costs.

Since Harrow Council first implemented their native solution, it has already seen year-on-year savings across its adult social care budgets of GBP 1 million. Harrow Council expects the new IBM Watson platform, incorporating the council’s expanded MCeP solution, to reduce costs even further by enabling care workers to optimise people’s health and well-being by offering GPs preventative options, reducing visits to hospitals and emergency rooms and driving competition among service providers.

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UX Research for other IBM Watson Health products

I was also conducting research using process described above for IBM Watson Health Watson Care Manager, Cúram Child Welfare & Truven Health Analytics Solutions:

• Watson Care Manager

IBM Watson Care Manager optimizes care management through individualized care plans that manage the whole person and engage the community.

I was working on research for drug court user segment.

• Cúram Child Welfare

Cúram Child Welfare provides a full case lifecycle solution for child welfare organizations. This integrated, cost-effective case management software supports key business requirements, helping to improve organizational effectiveness through family-centric, outcome-focused business processes.

I was working on designs, generative research and personas for Cúram Child Welfare Solutions.

• Truven Health Analytics Solutions

Truven Health Analytics® is an IBM Watson Health company that offers healthcare data and analytics services. It provides information, analytic tools, benchmarks, research and services to a variety of healthcare institutions, including hospitals, government agencies, employers, health plans, clinicians, pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies.

I was working on personas and Educational deck on Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) for Truven Health Analytics Solutions.

Please note that the assets and research I produced is IBM confidential. Please contact me for more information.