Building and growing lasting patient relationships

Problem

Docent Health started out as a concept within the healthcare incubator, Cien Ventures, when they recognized an opportunity in the healthcare space to help hospitals address the increasing importance of the patient’s experience.

While researching emerging Healthcare trends and interviewing C-Suite executives at top hospital chains around the country, Docent began hearing different hospital executives all note a similar problem. While they were once able to distinguish their institutions and attract new patients based on superior health outcomes, the differentiation between providers based on outcomes alone was diminishing and the patient’s experience with a particular institution was emerging as the main driver in a patient’s decision on where to undergo treatment.

Hospitals are stressful environments—how might we improve the patient experience?

As a result, executives were struggling to identify the primary factors that contributed to positive patient experiences. Discerning these factors would help them build programs focused around these enhancements. While researching this topic, Docent identified a hospital that was ahead of the curve, having already introduced an ambassador program solely focused on tracking, measuring and improving the customer experience within their institution.

Through a partnership with the hospital, Docent looked to spend time learning how the ambassador program operated in order to expand a similar model to other institutions. Docent understood from the beginning that a key to their success would be finding the right places to introduce technology into the program in order for it to scale.

Docent founders, Hugh Ma and Royal Tuthill, recognized that they had the industry and business experience to build out the services side of the business, but required assistance in figuring out how, where, and when technology could be introduced to support it. Having had past experiences working with MojoTech while part of a fortune-50 healthcare provider, Hugh and Royal turned to the MojoTech team they knew they could trust for help.

Discovery

To identify the role technology would play in their emergence as a company, Docent and MojoTech worked together on a 6-week discovery process that included:

1. Shadowing and interviewing users
   • Understand the vision and business objectives of Docent
   • Understand the different roles and personas of the ambassador team
   • Identify the keys that make them successful in what they do
   • Identify their pain points and potential places where they could benefit from a technology solution
2. Brainstorming and solution prioritization
   • Identify potential features for technology-based solutions to the ambassadors’ jobs and pain points
   • Prioritize solutions based on benefits and costs
   • Identify risks and constraints
3. Prototyping and testing Goals
   • Develop static prototypes to represent solution concepts
   • Gain valuable insights and feedback through user testing sessions
   • Validate product direction
   • Research and explore technical architectures to reduce risk
4. Defining and estimating the MVP
   • Identify the minimum viable product required to support launch of the business
   • Estimate the costs associated with building the technological requirements to understand funding required
   • Create a roadmap for future product direction

Solution

Through the discovery process, Docent’s founders were able to identify two key areas where technology would play an immediate role in helping their business grow:

• Ambassadors required a way to be able to record “soft” information about a patient and their preferences and share that information between team members while on the go.
• Managers required a way to allow ambassadors to log information about the tasks and activities they undertook in helping improve a patient’s experience, and correlate those events with improved patient experience outcomes.

Once the key activities were identified, the team was able to brainstorm, test, and prioritize a list of features that would provide the necessary support. From the list of features they created a product backlog and roadmap that clearly articulated the technological vision and short-term timeline for their product.

With these tools in hand the team at Docent was able to clearly articulate the vision for their product and business to a team of investors in order to raise the necessary capital to begin making their vision a reality.

Results

The partnership between Docent Health and MojoTech resulted in $17.1 million dollars in venture capital raised and a path toward uncovering important insights about what matters most to healthcare consumers.