Pathway Redesign Tool
A shared workspace that brings patient-experience insights and clinical-managerial evidence around the same care pathway, supporting discussion across professional perspectives.
Tool concept, pathway representation, prototype iterations, and development of the interactive web version.
- Origin: MSc thesis, Politecnico di Milano
- For: Service designers, healthcare professionals, and clinical managers
- Format: Spreadsheet prototypes and an interactive web version
One pathway, different perspectives
Improving a care service requires more than one kind of knowledge. A service designer may notice confusing information or a difficult encounter; a clinical manager may focus on waiting time or resource use. How can these concerns be discussed around the same process?
Pathway Redesign uses the clinical pathway as a shared reference. It explores the role of a boundary object: something different professional groups can work around without needing to share the same expertise.
| Perspective | What it brings into the conversation |
|---|---|
| Experience design | Arrangements, communication, encounters, locations, and qualitative observations. |
| Shared pathway | The care sequence, decision points, branches, and selected patient flow. |
| Clinical management | Lead time, waiting time, costs, effectiveness, and related evidence. |
Follow a flow, then compare the evidence
The workspace keeps both perspectives connected to the same selected sub-section and patient flow. Observations and measurements sit beside their interpretation, rather than being reduced to a score alone.
- Choose a point in the pathway. Select a sub-section and flow to focus the discussion.
- Record what each perspective sees. Add observations, roles, places, operational measures, and reasons for any grades.
- Read across the evidence. Use the matrix to compare flows and identify questions or priorities for redesign.
From mapping to dialogue
The project began with a service blueprint of Humanitas’s pre-admission process during my master’s work. Its representation developed through three forms:
- Service blueprint: understand the service process and its encounters.
- Timeline-based tool: align different kinds of evidence along common phases.
- Flowchart-based tool: keep branching clinical pathways at the centre instead of forcing them into a linear timeline.
Expert feedback raised a deeper question: who decides which dimensions matter, and what the grades mean? The thesis proposed jointly configuring the tool as part of the conversation. That was a future direction, not an implemented or longitudinally validated fourth thesis prototype.
Explore the current web prototype
The later web version makes this direction tangible through Set up together: teams can define their purpose, adjust dimensions and weights, and explain their grading criteria. The workspace, evidence matrix, and discussion-priority views offer different ways into the same material. Projects stay in the browser and can be exchanged as JSON files.
This is a design and facilitation prototype, not a deployed hospital system or a clinical decision tool. Its historical pathway example demonstrates the interface, not current medical guidance or evidence of improved patient outcomes.
Origin: MSc thesis at Politecnico di Milano, supervised by Prof. Daniela Sangiorgi. Text adapted from the project brief; screenshots show the live web prototype’s built-in illustrative example.
