When developing a new healthcare product or service it can be difficult to prioritize which features should be included in the initial release – especially when we consider the complexity of healthcare systems, regulatory requirements, and the need to continuously improve medical care and health outcomes.
Healthcare ecosystem mapping is a valuable tool for visualizing your product alongside its systems, processes, and data flows. It helps organizations understand how their work connects to the larger ecosystem. This understanding can improve services, streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and ensure compliance—all before development begins. Learn how to use this tool to ask critical questions and set priorities before investing in development.
In healthcare, user experience research and design provide product management and development teams with the ability to remove inefficiencies, save resources, and uncover gaps in both the clinical and business model. To have an impact, it’s essential to connect a patient’s journey and experience to the actions of various functional units within your organization, and how those activities impact both clinical goals and business outcomes.
To achieve this, it’s helpful to adopt approaches that employ systems thinking and draw on the broader healthcare ecosystem, including clinicians, patients, tools and devices. This technique is known as healthcare ecosystem mapping and is a very useful tool in user experience design.
What Is an Ecosystem Map?
In the same spirit that engineers use network architecture diagrams to understand how information might flow across networks, UX practitioners use ecosystem maps to understand the complex network of objects in a system, and account for all key interactions that will be affected by adding a new product or service.
For example:
- the system’s current state
- the problem we’re trying to solve
- the data currently being gathered
- where/with whom it is being shared, and
- how existing digital technologies and new technologies need to interact
Ecosystem maps can be developed from a company level perspective where they include various products or services or can be “zoomed in” to look at the ecosystem of just a specific product or service. By mapping out all the possible points of integration within the ecosystem, product teams can make more informed decisions about where to focus their efforts and investments, ensuring that the most critical touchpoints are addressed in the initial release. By looking at all the possible points of integration in the system you can choose where to prioritize investment and effort for the first release of the product.
What is a Healthcare Ecosystem Map?
A healthcare ecosystem map is a visual representation of the relationships, interactions, and key components within a healthcare system. At the heart of this ecosystem is the patient, but it also encompasses clinicians, administrators, insurers, and caregivers, and even the patient’s family. Alongside this are the technologies they rely on, such as electronic health records (EHRs), medical devices, and telemedicine platforms.
How Can Ecosystem Maps Help Healthcare Product Teams?
Ecosystem maps offer healthcare product teams a detailed view of how their product will fit into the broader picture. By visualizing this intricate web of interactions, healthcare ecosystem maps help product teams identify key touchpoints that need to be addressed in order to ensure the product integrates seamlessly into the patient journey and care process.
For product development teams, this clarity is crucial. Understanding how a new product integrates with existing workflows allows teams to address potential barriers early in the process. This might involve identifying compatibility issues with current healthcare systems, or the technologies that health providers and medical services use, pinpointing areas where the product might disrupt workflows, or finding opportunities to streamline the care process/patient journey.
How to Create a Healthcare Ecosystem Map
When creating a healthcare ecosystem map we start with trying to understand the current state of play, and outline the problem we are trying to solve. Here are some questions to get your thinking started:
What is the business problem we are solving for?
For example, perhaps we want to widen access to primary care and improve health equity, enhance patient outcomes, streamline clinical workflows, or strengthen patient/caregiver communications.
We might also ask whether we’re seeking to make improvements to a particular department, such as radiology or emergency care, or across multiple areas of the healthcare system, for example administration, patient care, and support services.
What stakeholders are impacted or involved in this?
This could range from patients and their families, to clinicians, administrative staff, and IT teams. It could even involve external partners such as research institutions, insurance providers or regulatory bodies, or non-profits and advocacy groups.
What devices are involved in the system? Think about the technology that supports care delivery, including electronic health records (EHR) systems, diagnostic equipment and telehealth platforms, as well as wearables and mobile devices like tablets or smartphones..
At what scale do we need to analyze this system?
For example…
- What are the boundaries of this ecosystem?
- What level of granularity do we need to reflect people in the ecosystem?
- Do we need to draw out individual specialties of clinicians (neurology, orthopedics, etc.) or is a more general grouping like “clinicians” suitable?
There is no hard and fast rule about how to answer any of these questions. In fact, when you begin mapping out your ecosystem it’s likely that you revisit your original answers and revise it a few times before it becomes useful.
Now that you have your current state mapped out, it’s time to add in the components that make up your desired future state. Here are the steps to mapping your new product into the existing ecosystem:
- Draw the main/central person (usually the patient, but it could be, for example, a caregiver or clinician) in the ecosystem.
- Draw the people and/or institutions for whom they have a central connection. In healthcare, this could include doctors, nurses, hospital administrators or insurance providers, or external care partners such as pharmacies or home health services.
- Draw the tools people use (such as cell phones, computers, smart speakers, connected devices), and how they’re used – for example, to book an appointment, manage a treatment plan, or access and update health records.
- Draw the additional details like the flow of money or the flow of data being sent and received.
Steps 1-3 make up the main part of the healthcare ecosystem. Step 4 will include details that are dependent on the nature of the experience you are trying to create and the problem you are trying to solve.
Now that you’ve got a handle on how to think about collecting the elements of your ecosystem map, let’s see what a healthcare ecosystem map looks like when we pull it all together.
Prioritize Investment Before Building
In healthcare, your ecosystem map offers valuable insights into the key interactions that shape the delivery of care, highlighting the touchpoints between patients, clinicians, technology and processes.
Your ecosystem map will provide a glimpse into what interactions patterns are key to governing your system and in particular, the interactions between people and devices that provide the most value to the user and your business.
The value of ecosystem mapping is in gaining insight into what parts of the system are critical to the experience and success of the project, shedding light on where to invest, along with prioritizing what needs to be done first before money is spent building the product.