Florida Hospital

Orlando, FL

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IDEAS has designed an innovative, story-based method of healthcare discovery and development.

With it, we can take two key actions: 

  • Discover the experience drivers most important to patients in determining the quality of their hospital stay
  • Develop actionable recommendations for improving the patient experience

The results have proved revolutionary. 

In fact, the project has redefined the patient care model at Florida Hospital and altered its understanding of what patients value. It’s also pinpointed the qualities that drive word-of-mouth marketing. 

The hospital is not simply implementing our recommendations. It’s also developing leadership and staff training tools based on our key constructs. 

Meanwhile, the project’s impact spreads throughout the entire organization.

Our Process and Efforts

First, we traveled to Florida Hospital’s primary medical center in Orlando. 

There, we gathered the stories of more than 200 patients, family members and caregivers during a week of in-room interview sessions.

These insights allowed us to better understand the prototypical patient stay from each perspective.

With 50 hours of recorded conversations and more than 2,000 pages of transcripts, we identified key patient experience drivers and developed visual models of patients’ emotional, psychological and priority pathways during their stay. 

Next, we cross-referenced this data with detailed observations we gathered during several site visits. 

Priorities, perceptions and feedback from patients, family members and staff filtered opportunities we’d prepared:

  • Wayfinding 
  • Messaging 
  • Interaction 
  • Programming 
  • Area improvement 

The end result has been a revolutionary new model of the patient experience as seen through the patient’s eyes. 

Our Core Program

We then developed a program for enhancing the patient experience. Altogether, we envisioned multiple options:

  • Expanded service offerings
  • Modified physical spaces 
  • New design and communication initiatives
  • Tools to communicate this new awareness through the existing work culture 

Then, we identified the key drivers that create the patient’s “belief bubble” about their stay. 

Finally, we developed an actionable plan for improving the experience.

Additionally, we created a series of short meta-stories that encapsulate the emotional journey, priority progression and points of confusion and disconnect. 

These stories provide a tool for sharing the perspectives of these three lead omni-characters who shape the hospital’s experience story. 

In turn, Florida Hospital is not only moving forward with implementing our work. Its team is also sharing it with the hospital system’s highest leadership levels. 

Their goal is to influence the whole organization’s thinking and actions at every level for patient care, marketing, staff training, enculturation and customer service.

Building on the Knowledge

We built upon this patient experience awareness work with Florida Hospital in helping design innovative spatial, environmental, visual and behavioral elements.

These elements adhere to the CREATION Health model for an optimal patient experience at its new Women’s Tower on the Orlando medical campus. 

In addition, these enhancements included recommendations across a range of experiential essentials in the minds of patients, family members and staff. 

Essentials include an array of factors:

  • Setting 
  • Comfort
  • Activity
  • Trust 
  • Choice 
  • Nutrition 
  • Interpersonal relationships 
  • The power of empathy when dealing with the realities of healing and loss

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