GRATEFUL PATIENT PROGRAM FOR CRAIG HOSPITAL FOUNDATION
Design Research
Strategic Design
Non-profit
The Craig Hospital is a Neurorehabilitation Center in Colorado that has a vibrant ‘alumni’ community and no shortage of veteran staff. As a MAP Fellow at Craig Hospital Foundation, I spent six months developing a strategic blueprint for their Grateful Patient Program. At Craig Hospital clinician-patient relationships extend far beyond typical medical care. The hospital's tight-knit community of patients and long-serving clinicians creates a deeply personal environment that resists traditional fundraising approaches. My primary objective was to design a philanthropic initiative that would seamlessly align with Craig's distinctive organizational culture and existing operational processes.
Using co-design methodology and human-centered design thinking, I researched to create a tailored program proposal. My approach focused on understanding the hospital's unique cultural dynamics and identifying ways to integrate philanthropic engagement that would feel authentic and natural to Craig's workflow and values.
Proposal: Tools and processes that the Craig Hospital Foundation will use to sustainably steward contributions from grateful patients, alumni, and their families. This includes…
staff training and referral processes,
materials to share with prospective participants (physical and digital),
and protocols for collecting data in a HIPAA-compliant manner.
Expanding on element #1:
Two key takeaways from codesign work with Craig's staff were (1) that there was a knowledge gap among staff about the initiatives the foundation supported and (2) that there is an opportunity to elevate specific staff members to be ‘ambassadors’ to the program.
Co-Design Methods in Exploration
During the exploratory phase of research I facilitated co-design methods by conducting several stakeholder interviews (with Craig leadership and patient alumni) and an in-person session with clinicians and foundation staff.
The in-person session was a workshop that encouraged creative thinking and collaboration between departments at Craig. The primary goal of the session was to find alignment between these groups about what the inpatient and outpatient journey looked like at Craig and brainstorm initial ideas on how to build out a Grateful Patient Program with empathy.
Participants were clinicians and foundation staff that were brought in for a collaborative session with little design experience. The environment created for the session was focused on being as hands-on, pro-active, and high-output. I started the session with creative warmups.
Journey maps for inpatient and outpatient experiences at Craig were built out with highlights on key tasks and touchpoints. These were digitized for future reference for further program development to help fill knowledge gaps about when it would be appropriate to reach out to patients and what amount of impact outreach may have on their likelihood to give.
A complex variable in how the foundation approaches interactions are the varying mindsets that patients and alumni may be in during their rehabilitation journey. I presented empathy mapping as a more structured method for identifying patient and alumni pain points and goals at each point of their journey. Empathy maps based on personas created for the workshop were digitized for future reference.
For the most part, the prototypes made during the in-person session were of physical materials. Different elements were highlighted like the use of the Craig Logo, the idea of Alumni cohorts, and QR-codes. Some additional ideas for showcasing philanthropy at Craig included displays.
Transforming Findings into Programming
The idea of doing staff training implied the question: what role are we training clinicians/research staff to fill? A proposed spectrum of involvement and an example training video were presented to a group Craig staff. Most feedback was about how having low-commitment allies and involved ambassadors made sense, but also about the lack of “foundational” about the role that philanthropy has at Craig Hospital.
A google form was used to document feedback given during the live focus group and capture more suggestions on program elements.
To broaden engagement and gather comprehensive insights, I developed a survey designed to explore the Craig community's potential interest in philanthropic training and involvement. The survey was carefully crafted to capture perspectives across different departments, serving as a diagnostic tool to identify the most receptive teams for initial pilot programs.
Building out a Toolkit
Since my time was limited with Craig and the program development and implementation would span several years, an additional goal of my work was to document these design research processes and create a toolkit that would enable a bias toward action. This toolkit included the resources developed in collaboration with the Craig community like the journey maps as well as other digital assets to start piloting early stage ideas around staff training.
This project would not be possible without the guidance of my MAP mentor Becky Plunkett. Thank you for the Craig Community being so open to new methods and ideas. Special thanks for my ‘Craig Experts’: Cristina, Deepa, Will, Jan, Brooke, Shannon and Annette!
