Designing a Digital-First Hospital Check-In Service

Developing recommendations for Geisinger’s kiosk check-in pilot by mapping patient-facing and staff-facing bottlenecks, and proposing a scalable service model for digital check-in.

Context

This case study details a Service design pilot project to enhance the patient check-in experience and to lower staff burden at Geisinger Health, a leading healthcare provider. The shortage of staff was affecting both patient satisfaction and employee engagement.

I joined a team that included a Service Designer, Reenu John (Experience Design Lead), and Hospital leadership, Rebecca A. Stametz (Vice President Innovation & Strategy).

Together, we explored what it would take to Identifying pain points and bottlenecks of current system and develop strategic recommendations for a digital-first check-in solution.

Snapshot

Role

Service Designer / Design Strategist

Timeline

8 weeks

Project Type

Team

0→1 pilot strategy · Research planning · stakeholder interviews · observational studies · workflow analysis · affinity mapping · service blueprinting

Experience Design Lead· Service Designer · VP of Digital Transformation

Core Challenge

Initial framing

Geisinger identified the need to improve the hospital check-in experience. The issue was not only about patient convenience. Staff shortages were affecting both patient satisfaction and employee engagement.

What we learned

The organization wanted to explore a more digital-first check-in model using kiosks. But in a hospital environment, a kiosk is not just a piece of technology. It changes the work around the front desk, patient guidance, demographic verification, payment collection, staff responsibilities, and downstream revenue workflows.

So the core challenge was not simply:

Can patients use a kiosk?

The more important service design question was:

What needs to change across people, process, and technology for digital check-in to actually work in a hospital setting?

My Role

My main contribution was helping make the operational complexity visible. I focused on connecting what patients experienced at check-in with the backstage realities of staff workload, data verification, payment collection, system limitations, and department-level priorities.

My responsibilities included:

Planning and designing user studies.

Synthesizing findings into insights.

Understanding the current check-in model.

Developing proposed service maps.

Since we were a remote team, all the messy work happened in Miro!

How We Structured the Work

Phase 1: Research and Current-State Understanding

The first six weeks focused on understanding the existing check-in experience through secondary research, research planning, stakeholder interviews, observational studies, contextual inquiry, workflow analysis, and current-state service mapping.

Phase 2: Insight Delivery and Service Recommendations

The final two weeks focused on translating the research into usable outputs: an insights document, a one-page leadership visual, and a proposed-state service blueprint.

Research Approach

Because this was a hospital environment, the research had to be practical. We had tight timelines, limited participant availability, privacy constraints, and busy staff. So instead of designing a heavy research process, I helped shape a lightweight approach that could fit into the organization’s reality.

I built the plan and the guide, my teammate, Kevin Hall brought it into the field!

Research and observation studies with PARs, hospital staff at Woodbine (Derm, Peds, CMSL, Ortho, Labs) and Muncy Campuses

Three Tensions

The research showed that digital check-in was being limited by three tensions.

Patient confusion

There were too many check-in options. Patients were not always sure which path to take, when to use the kiosk, or when to ask for help.

Staff burden

Patient Access Representatives were still responsible for verification, troubleshooting, payment conversations, and helping patients move through the process.

System misalignment

Workflows and department responsibilities were not fully aligned. This meant the kiosk could reduce some work, but it could also expose or shift work elsewhere.

How the Work Took Shape

The work took shape through three layers: analyzing interview data, mapping the current service, and developing insights that moved beyond symptoms.

Current-state mapping

I mapped the existing check-in journey across patient actions, staff actions, systems, payment steps, and backstage dependencies to identify gaps across patient confusion, PAR workload, payment discomfort, incomplete payment technology, and technology-workflow gaps. .

Highest Staff dependency due to data verification.

Snapshot of service blueprint for the current checkin process

Insight synthesis

From interviews, observations, and current-state mapping, we saw issues across patient confusion, PAR workload, payment discomfort, incomplete payment technology, and technology-workflow gaps.

I helped group these findings into three system-level themes, which made the system easier to understand using 5 Whys-style root cause analysis.

Working sessions checking our early insights with the teams closest to the check-in experience. — digital transformation and PAR leadership!

Outcome

The solution was a set of clear, skimmable recommendations that Innovation leadership could use in conversations with other leaders, IT, Data, Product, Operations, and Revenue Management.

Proposal: Service Blueprint for a kiosk based check-in experience.

Once the recommendation direction was clear, I used it to inform a future-state service blueprint. One of the short-term priorities was to improve data collection and data quality earlier in the check-in process. the self-service kiosk was positioned as a way to handle routine check-in tasks earlier and more consistently.

Reduces PAR Dependency for data collection and verification

Strategic Impact

Our work supported Geisinger’s digital kiosk check-in pilot at the Woodbine and Muncy campuses, achieving 40% adoption.

The value of the work was not only that patients used the kiosk. The value was that the team better understood what made adoption possible:

Patients needed clearer guidance.
Staff needed reduced burden, not shifted burden.
Payment and data workflows needed to support the digital model.
Leadership needed governance before scaling.
Technology needed to fit the real service environment.
The project helped make those conditions visible.

Key Learnings

1. Digital adoption is a service problem, not just a technology problem.

The kiosk only worked when the workflow around it supported patients and staff.

2. Service design is most valuable when it makes hidden work visible

A lot of the friction was not obvious from the patient's side. Mapping the helped reveal how much hidden work PARs were carrying.

3. Good recommendations need to travel across teams

The insights had to be clear enough for Innovation leadership to use in conversations with IT, Data, Product, Operations, and Revenue teams.

Here is what I discovered through the work.

<< Previous Project

Next Project >>