Background

Singapore is going through an aging population. Many nursing home in Singapore seems to need to be more effective and efficient to pick up on this task. However, there is a systemic challenge due to the lack of effective workflows, infrastructural limitations, resource constraints and monetary boundaries. At the same time, there needs to be dignity and respect for the patients, offering them good end-of-life care and support. Moreover, there is a big stigma for such homes. The government looked at Philips to do a multi-million dollar deep ethnographic dive to study the landscape and to map out what areas can be improved both in qualitative and quantitative aspects.

Challenge

How might we allow for better end-of-life holistic care to the elderly at nursing homes? How might we be more effective in the services provided, allowing for cost-savings and better data-driven processes? How might technology and infrastructure help to play in multi-faceted systemic issue?

Approach

I was personally involved in deep ethnographic research, presenting and analysing large lean data and conducting or co-facilitating design workshops and interviews with up to 250 healthcare professionals. We spent up to 15hours/day over 40 plus days in multiple healthcare organizations conducting the team’s first collaboration between both deep ethnographic (qualitative) and lean (quantitative) research (triangulation). Alot of the ethnographic work was newly configured, partially due to covid arrangements.

Solution

Contributed to a big part of the research papers by being the hands and legs of the daily research. I pioneered and conducted the team’s first live-streaming service for clients as well as many full/partial virtual design workshops at both Philips design centre and at our client’s workspace through data analysis.