Brigham and Women's/Faulkner Hospitals in Boston has a world-renowned reputation for clinical, research, and teaching excellence. But like most research and teaching hospitals of its size, it saw opportunities to improve its patient experience. IDEO helped Brigham and Women's/Faulkner implement a design strategy that would create a culture of service excellence within the hospital.

An internal process-improvement team partnered with IDEO consultants to develop several patient-experience design projects. The team tackled two of the most challenging patient experience designs: post-partum care and presurgery preparation. The first involves new mothers -- patients who are not sick and therefore expect a different experience than hospitals typically deliver; the complex and confusing presurgery experience spans multiple facilities and visits. The teams then identified methods that would enhance communication between referring physicians and the hospital, improve team communications, streamline patient flow, and decrease waiting time and overall length of stay.

Through the rapid creation and evaluation of prototypes of these services, the hospital implemented changes that decreased patient waiting time between 11 and 31 percent in the surgery area, and improved overall patient and staff satisfaction. Brigham and Women's/Faulkner now has a team trained in the innovation process and applies this process to new projects selected by senior leadership. Projects that once took up to two years are completed in two months or less. On the strength of the completed projects, hospital leadership has made service excellence a cornerstone of its overall strategy.