A Service Design Thinking Approach for
Stakeholder-Centred eHealth
Eunji LEE
1
SINTEF, Norway
Abstract. Studies have described the opportunities and challenges of applying
service design techniques to health services, but empirical evidence on how such
techniques can be implemented in the context of eHealth services is still lacking.
This paper presents how a service design thinking approach can be applied for
specification of an existing and new eHealth service by supporting evaluation of
the current service and facilitating suggestions for the future service. We propose
Service Journey Modelling Language and Service Journey Cards to engage
stakeholders in the design of eHealth services.
Keywords. eHealth, stakeholders, service design, service design techniques
1. Introduction
eHealth is a healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communication
[1]. Stakeholders in eHealth services play important roles when adopting or integrating
new technologies in their work [2, 3], but the design process of eHealth services is
characterised by insufficient stakeholders’ engagement [4]. Failure to identify
stakeholders and their needs in eHealth projects resulted in customers not being
satisfied and required redoing of many parts of the projects [5]. To improve this
situation, service design thinking approach can be considered. Service design thinking
is an interdisciplinary approach to make services more useful, usable, desirable,
efficient, and effective [6]. One of the five core principles of service design thinking is
co-creation: all stakeholders must be involved in the service design process [6].
Several studies have revealed the opportunities and challenges of applying service
design techniques in health services [7-12] . However, there has been little attention on
the application of these techniques in eHealth services. This paper considers the
following research question: How can a service design thinking approach be applied in
eHealth service design?
2. Methods
We conducted a case study in Norway from August to November 2014 to evaluate a
message exchange module in an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and to gather
ideas for future improvement. For the design of our case study, we considered four
components affecting service experience [13]: (a) service customers, (b) service
1
Corresponding Author: eunji.lee@sintef.no
Exploring Complexity in Health: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach
A. Hoerbst et al. (Eds.)
© 2016 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press.
This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).
doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-678-1-177
177