Persona Mapping Framework

  1. Overview & Background

    The Canadian insititute for Health Information(CIHI) provides actionable data and information to facilitate the development Canada’s healthcare system, and the CIHI persona framework is an essential reference for us to understand the needs of healthcare practitioners and how they interact with CIHI.

    The Persona data is extracted from a survey back in 2022 consisting 400+ participants with various roles in the healthcare field. The survey is based on various metrics including the CIHI tool uage, Persona collaboration, and site improvements.

    I was responsible for conducting quantitative research analysis of both CIHI tool usage and persona collaboration pattern in this project along with other stakeholders such as martketing team, digital analytics team, and design team.

    Currently, there are six personas identified which includes: Healthcare Worker, Oragnization leader, Researcher, Healthcare Advisor, Data Analyst, Input Logger.

    Several examples of existing CIHI tools include: Reports,Educational Services, Manual, Statisitcs, Indicator Packages, etc.

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My Role: User Experience Analyst Intern

Duration: 4 months

Team: 2 Senior UX reseachers, 2 Digital Analysts, 1 Data Visualisation intern

Tools Used: Mural, Excel, Microsoft Suite.

2. Problem

We believe that we do not have a clear understanding of how healthcare practitioners work with each other and CIHI services and tools are used.

So, a two-stage 2-stage data analysis is implemented for understanding the following questions:

  • What CIHI tools do users typically engage in ?

  • How is the tool Usage broken down by persona ?

  • What are the relationships among various personas?

  • What healthcare information is exchanged?

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3. Objectives

Business Objectives:

  • The business is based on the interconnected healthcare system, which aims to promote users obtaining healthcare data and communicating the insights to borader audience to achieve positive impact in national healthcare system.

Research Objectives:

  • Understand how various healthcare practitioners interact with CIHI services and how the usage is broke down by persona.

  • Understand how personas work with each other and the information exchange flow.

4. Research Methods

  1. Quantitative analysis of tool statistics: By counting the total number of people selecting the specific tools such as CIHI reports, Edu services, Quick stats, etc, a general picture of how CIHI tools are used across all participants is completed along with the specific breakdown by persona.

  2. Quantitative analysis of Persona collaboration: Similiar approach from the previous research question, but focused on persona collaboration and information exchange.

  3. Digital Analytics: The digital analytics team provides the precise CIHI domain visits which is later contrasted with self-reported usage data for reference.

  4. Affinity Diagramming: Organized persona cards on Mural based on collaboration pattern along with the information exchange flow.

5. Findings Part 1: CIHI tool Analysis

Based on the results of the quantitative analysis, the graph demonstrates how CIHI tools are used by persona

  • CIHI reports and Educational services are self-reported as the most used CIHI tools across all participants except researchers (CIHI reports followed by Quick Stats).

  • Other indicator packages, YHS, and portal, etc., are also used but taking only half of the CIHI reports and educational services usage.

  • Minimal use of equery and people with no exposure to CIHI tools are observed.

  • The digital analytics data do not exhibit the same trend from the self-reported data

  • Compared to self-reported data, we do not see significant visits of learning.cihi.site on the digital analytics side.

  • Other tools, such as YHS, indicator packages, and portal, also exhibit less visits compared to the self-reported usage.

6. Findings Part 2: Persona Analysis

The second round of data analysis and Affinity diagramming illustrate how CIHI personas work with each other and how healthcare information is exchanged among personas:

  • Surprisingly, the data shows that Healthcare Worker is the central hub for the persona network, as 4 out of 6 personas work directly with healthcare providers.

  • Some personas work primarily with themselves, such as Researchers.

  • CIHI coding manual become the most exchanged information for 4 out of 6 personas, followed by self-made reports and analysis.

  • In general, self-made research reports and CIHI raw data & table are exchanged among researchers and decision makers, while CIHI coding manual (manual for coding healthcare data to CIHI) is exchanged for other personas.

7. Discussions and Summary

In general, the results from the 2-stage data analysis suggest that CIHI reports and CIHI Educational services are self-reported as the most used CIHI tools across all participants, except researchers; no significant distinctions of tool usage is observed when the pattern is broken down by persona.

The self-reported usage is signifcantly skewed from the actual domain visit, especially for CIHI eduactional services.

Healthcare Providers become the central point of persona collaboration exchanging primarily CIHI coding manuals with other personas such as other healthcare providers, record submitters, and data analysts. However, for researchers or decision makers, the collaboration involves mostly data and reports.

Several actionable takeaways worth noting for further research and decision making:

The result comes from a self-reported survey and there are discrepancies when we contrast the self-report setting with the actual CIHI domain visits, and this is probably due to the lack of alignment with user on the CIHI tool definition. For example, is “Portal” a specific CIHI product or the CIHI landing page to them ? Are users perceiving educational service tool as training (formal education) on healthcare topics or something else ?

CIHI coding maual becomes the most exchanged information in the persona framwork, this implies healthcare practitioners are still spending time in learning to code healthcare data into appropriate formats. This suggests more improvements to the CIHI and CIHI user interaction in the future, which is essential to streamline healthcare data sharing and the collaboration among healthcare practitioners.

When Educational needs are consistently noticed across different platforms, these products needs to be more holistic and contextual to user’s needs, which is essential in future product development and the enhanced knowledge of healthcare practitioner.

In addition, the second part of analysis could be further refined when we integrate the extra data on participants’ background. For example, for healthcare providers, do they work in a hospital or non-hospital setting? If so, what would the collaboration pattern look like?

The discrepancies between self-reported usage and digital analytics suggest that we do not see as much usage as we expect for specific functional tools built for specific personas such as quick stats. This implies that we should consider if we are building services based on the importance and affordance to users interacting with CIHI.