Hospital @home: Delivering care at home for patients recovering from a stem cell transplant

For Oslo University Hospital through the Oslo School of Architecture & Design + Centre for Connected Care (C3) / Master's course / 2019

With a shift in the landscape of providing specialised healthcare in Norway, the ward for blood-sicknesses in the Oslo University Hospital was in an early stage of developing a new service. The Hospital @home Experience (H@H) looked at creating a value based service development tool to ease transition towards extending care services to the homes of patients while responding to the immediate needs of the service — information dissemination and support for caregivers.

Research process

The two week research phase consisted of a ‘big-picture’ kick-off workshop with 30 participants (the ward, innovation dept, ICT, communication dept), in-depth interviews with multiple actors (doctors, nurses, leadership, occupational therapists, innovation team, patients, caregivers), visit to a patient home, observations during field visit and the ward, conversations with different departments at the hospital, and presentations by key external partners (NAV, Diffia).

Nominated for the award Strategic Use of Design, powered by PwC LiveWork; Nominated for the award Service Design, powered by Making Waves

The front end: Information dissemination & support for caregivers

The front-end makes interventions in the current user journey, proposing new service moments. The interventions intend to let users make informed decisions while opting for the H@H service and mitigate changes in relationship dynamics.

The back end: A value based tool for service development

The back-end includes suggestions for feedback collection, prototyping and improving the service experience.

Consistent service experiences ensure that our users are not misunderstood or feel confused about what the service is meant to deliver. Today, the H@H model heavily depends on the nurses going out to patient homes. A single patient might be visited by different nurses throughout the patient journey leading to a varying service experience. For example, a patient might find a nurse cold because she refused coffee at a home visit or might find it imposing to make coffee for the nurse every time she comes over. In practice, we can try to be more intentional with our actions to deliver a thoughtful service experience.

Therefore, we propose a tool that will be centred around the back-end service development. It will rely on the values of the service which will inform how the service should be delivered to the patients at home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The road ahead

A roadmapping workshop was conducted after our final project presentation to a larger audience. The session was meant to handover work done for our client.

Using a simple timeline based approach we divided the implementation framework into immediate, short term and long term goals. Along with involved nurses from the ward, the head nurse, the project manager and key driver from the innovation unit, we defined the next steps.

The team was welcoming and enthusiastic about testing the ideas and collecting initial feedback. Work on the information kit began in July 2019.