ICL: Healthcare Innovations

Context

Communications design project for the Healthcare Innovations team at the Institute for Community Living (ICL). Project completed for my master’s program in Design for Social Innovation.

Introduction

The Institute for Community Living (ICL) is a healthcare agency that helps people address emotional, mental health, and developmental disability challenges so that they can live independently and contribute to their community. In January 2018, we partnered with their Healthcare Innovations team to address internal communications challenges.

Initial Project Brief:

People with serious mental illness die 15-20 years earlier than the rest of the population. This has alarmed the behavioral health field as they realize they are failing their patients and can no longer separate mental health from physical wellness and the strength of support systems.

ICL is leading an effort to instill this mindset and shift their workforce from thinking of themselves as behavioral health specialists to healthcare providers addressing client’s whole health. The design team from SVA will help present and promote this shift internally to the staff and ICL’s leadership in this area to the outside world.

“Success would mean that every ICL employee understands the role they play in helping the people and communities we serve improve their health status and long term outcomes.”

Research

Research Questions: What are the current mindsets and behaviors of ICL employees around this shift and their role? How is ICL currently communicating with their employees? What communication gaps or barriers exist?

Activities:

• Conducted a communications audit of ICL’s current communications and materials

• Interviewed 62 staff members including 44 front-line staff, 10 executive level staff, and 8 program participants

• Held regular meetings and check-in presentations with the team at ICL to present our insights and receive feedback throughout the process

Insights: We found that there was a disconnect between leadership at ICL headquarters and front-line staff working directly with patients in clinics and programs:

1. Leadership wanted to implement new values throughout the organization (called TRIP values - trauma-informed, recovery-oriented, integrated, and person-centered care - which represented addressing whole health). However, front-line staff felt like they are already incorporating these values into their work.

2. There were multiple different understandings of the TRIP values across the organization and a need for more clear and simple language.

3. Front-line staff felt under-valued and under-appreciated.

Communications Strategy and Design

Based on our insights and the needs of the ICL team, we designed creative for internal messaging to their staff with the following goals:

• Reframe TRIP values (trauma-informed, recovery-oriented, integrated, and person-centered care) into actionable practices and ensure a shared understanding through the use of plain language, stories, and examples

• Celebrate and appreciate the hard work of front-line staff

• Put values into practice to improve physical, public spaces

We presented various design concepts to the ICL team and iterated on our ideas to come up with the following 4 concepts to implement.

Values Posters

We designed 4 large-scale posters to be displayed in clinic lobbies and waiting rooms. Each poster highlighted a TRIP value and provided an example of a staff member successfully implementing that value to care for a patient’s whole health. All photos were taken by our team to represent ICL staff and program participants.

Touchstone Cards

We designed touchstone cards with simple reminders and concrete ways for staff to practice TRIP values.

Inspiration Wall

We built interactive installations in clinic waiting rooms to put values into practice and inspire and motivate both staff and program participants.

Pull-Tab Posters

We created pull-tab posters to display in staff meeting rooms and break rooms asking employees to “take what they need” and providing words of encouragement and appreciation to recognize the hard work they do.

Key Takeaways

• Being okay with not knowing: We learned to be comfortable with not knowing what we would end up designing or making at the beginning of the project. We went in just being open and trying to learn about the different problems and challenges, and then used our research to inform the final design.

• Information vs. Insights: We discovered that not everything you learn is an “insight” - an insight must be novel, actionable, and provide meaning. We learned to asked ourselves “so what? what does that mean?” with each piece of information we learned.

• Critical Thinking: Through this project I also learned how to have more of a critical eye, not only for other’s work, but for my own work. Language and messaging were key, so I learned how to finesse language and get your message across using simple, clear language.