Service Design Service Blueprint User Research Healthcare

Designing a digital-first hospital check-in service.

Service research that reframed a kiosk rollout as a system problem — and shaped the strategy behind a check-in program that later scaled across Pennsylvania.

Role

Service Designer / Design Strategist

Timeline

8 weeks

Team

Experience Design Lead, Service Designer & hospital innovation leadership

Client

Geisinger (Innovation & Strategy)

The Problem

A front desk buckling under staff shortages

At Geisinger, staff shortages strained check-in from both sides: patients waited longer, and Patient Access Representatives absorbed a growing load of verification, payment, and troubleshooting. Satisfaction and engagement fell together — a sign the front desk wasn't the problem, just where it surfaced.

Leadership planned to pilot self-service kiosks at two campuses. Our brief: find the bottlenecks and shape a digital-first strategy ahead of that rollout. The obvious starting question was can patients use a kiosk?

That question was too small — and seeing why became the project.

The Reframe

In a hospital, a kiosk isn't just a touchscreen. It reshapes the work around it — verification, payment, staff responsibilities, downstream revenue. If those structures didn't change with it, the kiosk would shift burden rather than remove it, and adoption would stall no matter how good the screen was.

Can patients use a kiosk?

THE REAL QUESTION ↓

What has to change across people, process, and technology for digital check-in to work as a service — and survive scaling?

My Role

Connecting the front desk to the back office

The friction patients felt was a symptom of work happening out of their sight — verification across multiple systems, fragmented payment, unclear department ownership. My job was to connect the two sides so leadership could see the whole system, not just the queue.

I owned the research plan and interview guide, the insight synthesis, and the current- and proposed-state service blueprints. A teammate ran the field sessions; I shaped what we looked for and what it meant.

Research synthesis in Miro — Working sessions checking early insights with the teams closest to check-in — digital transformation and PAR leadership.

The Research

Built to fit a working hospital, not a lab

Six weeks to understand the current state, two to make it actionable. A hospital doesn't pause for research, so I shaped a lightweight approach that fit its reality while still getting the signal we needed.

Stakeholder interviews Observational studies Contextual inquiry Workflow analysis Service blueprinting

Run with PARs and clinical staff across two campuses, it surfaced three tensions holding digital check-in back:

Patient confusion

Too many check-in options — patients weren't sure which path to take.

Staff burden

PARs still owned verification, troubleshooting, and payment for every patient.

System misalignment

Workflows and department roles didn't line up, so a kiosk could shift work as easily as remove it.

The Insight

The blueprint exposed where the system actually broke

What mapping revealed

I mapped the check-in journey end to end — patient actions, frontstage and backstage staff work, and the systems behind each step. One thing jumped out: the heaviest staff dependency sat at demographic data verification, where a single check-in forced PARs across multiple platforms. Payment was so fragmented that some collections fell through entirely.

Using 5-Whys, I grouped the issues into three system-level themes — governance, operational efficiency, and training gaps — so leadership saw causes, not symptoms.

The Strategy

Findings don't change anything — adopted findings do

The research was only as good as leadership's willingness to act on it. Two framing decisions made that happen.

Move 01 — Sequencing for credibility

Data quality first, governance later

Root-cause work pointed to centralized governance as the real fix — but with PARs reporting into departments with conflicting priorities, that was a multi-year political fight. Leading with it would have shelved the strategy.

So I split the recommendation by time horizon: data quality now — fixable, measurable, startable immediately — with governance staged as the long-term goal.

An early, actionable win keeps the harder structural conversation alive instead of dying in the room.

Move 02 — Anchoring on honest tradeoffs

Build on the rails they already owned

Rather than propose a new system, I anchored the strategy on the three check-in methods already live in Geisinger's Epic ecosystem — and named each one's real cost: not every patient demographic is comfortable with self-service, some verification has to stay at the desk, and payment still leans on PARs.

Naming the tradeoffs was the point. Recommendations that hide them read as advocacy; ones that surface them read as analysis — and operators only fund the second kind.

Making It Travel

A one-pager that argued for itself

Leadership would carry the recommendations into rooms with IT, Data, Product, Operations, and Revenue — usually with no designer present. So I built the one-pager around a metaphor: a digital solution is like a city, working only when the infrastructure beneath it holds together. Each stakeholder saw their problem before our answer — and that page became the artifact leadership used.

Outcome

An operating model the organization could build toward

I translated the strategy into a future-state service blueprint: the kiosk positioned to handle routine check-in — identity, demographics, forms, biometric — earlier and more consistently, cutting PAR dependency and shrinking the downstream revenue queues that bad data creates. Not a screen design; an operating model.

Gave leadership a strategy they could defend across five departments without a designer present
The blueprint informed Geisinger's check-in direction — a program that later scaled across Pennsylvania

My contribution ended at the strategy. The real deliverable wasn't the blueprint — it was making hidden operational cost visible enough to act on.

Reflections

What I took from it — and what I'd take further

Digital adoption is a service problem, not a technology problem. The kiosk only worked when the workflow around it supported both patients and staff. The touchscreen was never the hard part.

A strategy is only as good as its ability to travel. This one had to hold up in five different departments without a designer in the room — so designing for that portability was the real deliverable, not the blueprint.

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