Partner Company: The Estonian Health Board
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team Health Board: Katrin Põldsepp and Maris Palgi (Conversion Master in IT students), Merey Beisembayev and Toghrul Pashabayli (Master's in Innovation and Technology Management students)
Semester: Spring 2023
The challenge
The Estonian Health Board, or Terviseamet, is a governmental agency under the Ministry of Social Affairs responsible for healthcare, health protection, environmental health, chemical safety, and medical device safety in Estonia. They also provide chargeable laboratory services for assessing water quality. Terviseamet has received more user feedback that environmental health data is not conveniently available to citizens, research institutions, companies, or other state institutions. The data is scattered across different sections of the Terviseamet website as well as various other government websites and news outlets, posing difficulties in locating the necessary information. Despite the surge in public concern over health and well-being, the current Terviseamet website needs help to provide an efficient, user-friendly, and interactive platform for various stakeholders to conveniently access environmental health data for personal awareness and research purposes.
On the other hand, business clients that have to report and cooperate with Terviseamet experience time-consuming and error-prone manual data entry process that causes delays in data availability. Furthermore, organizations dealing with radio frequencies and water management have expressed the need for an updated and modernized data collection system.
Process and solution
The Health Board team started with a thorough investigation of the different sections of the Terviseamet webpage to better understand the current situation with negative user feedback. Moreover, they identified and interviewed the main stakeholders: Citizens, Water management operators, Mobile Operators, and The Terviseamet team. Afterward, the team developed several personas and a user journey for a citizen.
After several rounds of How Might We questions and different ideation techniques, the Health Board team formulated the problem with one sentence, "finding information about environmental health," focused on the target group (citizens), and set up the goal to design a user-friendly webpage with up-to-date data and other features.
Ultimately, the Health Board team suggested a possible redesign of the current website to make it more interactive, user-friendly, and integrated with all the background business-related processes. Moreover, the team developed Business Process Map for both water quality and mobile operator sides. Maps included pointers for improving the speed of internal business processes that slow down data entry and collection.