SELECTED CASE STUDY
Ontario Health
7-Step Approach to Enterprise Journeys & Product Service Management
Redesigning Ontario's eReferral and Central Intake Service Experience
Making Complex Healthcare Services Visible, Measurable and Actionable
Proprietary information has been removed or anonymized.
Visuals and examples have been recreated for case study purposes
or drawn from publicly available sources.
EXECUTIVE FRAMING
Ontario Health's eReferral and Central Intake initiative is part of the province's Patients Before Paperwork program — a large-scale effort to modernize how referrals move between primary care, specialists, hospitals and other healthcare services on a new technology platform.
in 2024/25
Publicly reported program-scale figures retained from the previous portfolio version; proprietary project information is excluded.
MY CONTRIBUTION
My Role
Lead Senior Service Designer
Scope of Work
End-to-end current-state and future-state service journeys, technical and experience workflow mapping; persona analysis, detailed service blueprints, and pain point and KPI measurement.
Key Outcomes & Impact
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Enterprise Standards
Established Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 service blueprint formats, adopted as Ontario Health enterprise standards to support operating-model implementation, operational procedures, and new program initiatives.
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Cross-Functional Alignment
Secured buy-in for 30+ service recommendations and aligned 3 technical teams across 4 clinical pathways on implementation priorities, informing product, architecture, and change-management decisions .
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Requirements & Transformation
Developed 10+ end-to-end use cases and identified 20+ operational change points in clinical workflows, translating findings into actionable requirements for technical teams and changes implemented by 7 regional change-management teams to support platform launch.
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Customer Experience Measurement
Implemented a 7-stage Voice of Customer measurement plan, linking patient and clinician journeys, 5 operational personas, and service metrics to prioritize experience improvements.
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Operational Visibility
Mapped 200+ end-to-end workflow and service blueprint steps and identified 30+ pain points, exposing clinical handoffs, platform dependencies, and improvement opportunities across 5 enterprise teams.
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AI Innovation
Built and demonstrated an AI-assisted change-impact proof of concept comparing service blueprint versions, identifying affected stakeholders, and generating audience-specific change communications.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MY WORK — AT A GLANCE
THE CHALLENGE - TRANSFORMING CONNECTED SERVICES
Ontario Health
Large-scale digital transformation is rarely a single customer journey.
Service transformation requires understanding a connected system of customer and employee experiences, operational workflows, technologies, policies, handoffs, measures and organizational responsibilities.
Working within Ontario Health's Patients Before Paperwork transformation, my role involved helping make that complexity visible and actionable across initiatives supporting healthcare service delivery.
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Productizing into a Service Experience and Tech framework that all internal and external stakeholders can use and delivers value.
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The challenge was not simply to create a journey map, it was to create a shared understanding of how the service works end-to-end and front-to-back.
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Connecting the experience of people using the service with the operational work required to deliver it.
01
VALUE PROPOSITION DEFINITION
What game are we playing?
Before mapping a journey, establish what the service is trying to make possible — for the people using it and for the organization delivering it.
This framing creates the reference point for everything that follows. It keeps research, journey stages, workflows and measures connected to an intended service outcome rather than becoming disconnected artifacts.
What value is the service intended to create?
For whom is that value being created?
What problem or outcome is the transformation trying to address?
What must be true operationally for that promise to be credible?
What evidence would tell us whether the service is succeeding?
This framing connected delivery requirements and success measures to the value the service needed to create for patients, clinicians and Ontario Health.
02
ORGANIZATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGY & RESEARCH COLLECTION
What do we need to play the game?
Complex organizations already contain a large amount of knowledge about the service — but that knowledge is usually fragmented across documents, teams, systems and previous initiatives.
I start by collecting and interpreting what the organization already knows: existing research, requirements, system information, workflow descriptions, screenshots, use cases, standards, prior artifacts and SME knowledge.
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Organizational Archaeology
This organizational archaeology analysis creates an evidence base before new research begins, revealing strengths in existing knowledge, disagreements between sources, and opportunities for targeted interviews and new validation activities to add the most value.
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Stakeholder Research
To fill identified gaps, I designed interviews and surveys to target 20+ health-system professionals, including provincial clinical leads, product owners, pathway owners, end users, technology and change management teams, to identify Jobs-To-Be-Done, unmet needs, persona roles and current-state workflow challenges.
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User and Service Research
Together with the UX designer we documented tasks and steps across 10+ platform solutions, from a macro and micro lens , to uncover pain points and behavioural observations for further journey, workflow and service-design analysis.
The research consolidated fragmented knowledge into evidence for requirements development, highlighting workflow gaps and dependencies that needed further validation.
03
PERSONAS & ACTORS
Who are the players?
Enterprise services are rarely experienced or delivered by a single user. They involve multiple people with different goals, responsibilities, levels of authority and operational constraints.
Persona and actor models helped make those differences visible and prevented the journey from being reduced to a generic “user” perspective.
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Actor Roles & Interactions
The actor model distinguished direct service interactions from behind-the-scenes work, clarifying each actor’s role in service delivery.
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Actor Goals & Dependencies
The actor model clarified what each actor needs to accomplish, where responsibilities shift, and which information and systems they depend on.
Those roles then remained traceable across journeys, workflows and service blueprints.
The actor model made responsibilities, handoffs and system dependencies explicit, providing a basis for role-specific requirements and change planning.
04
JOURNEY MAPPING
What is the playing field?
The journey provides the shared end-to-end view of the service: the stages through which people move, what they are trying to accomplish, and where experience and operational complexity accumulate.
Complex enterprise journeys rarely live inside one application, department or organizational chart. The journey therefore had to look across touchpoints and organizational boundaries rather than treating each interaction in isolation.
The journey acted as the common playing field: a stable enough structure for teams to locate research, operational detail, moments that matter and measures while still allowing the underlying evidence to evolve.
The shared journey connected onboarding, training, usage and support, helping teams assess how implementation decisions affected the wider service experience.
05
OPERATIONAL WORKFLOWS
How is the game actually played?
Frontstage experiences depend on backstage operations.
A seemingly small improvement to a customer or clinician touchpoint can create additional work somewhere else. Removing information from one interaction, for example, may simplify that moment while increasing downstream clarification, administrative effort, delays or rework.
I connected journey-level experience views with detailed operational workflows showing how work actually progresses through roles, decisions, systems, state changes and handoffs.
“What happens to the entire service if we change this touchpoint?”
Workflow analysis informed 10+ end-to-end use cases and 20+ operational change points, supporting technical requirements and launch preparation across 7 regional change-management teams.
06
SERVICE BLUEPRINTS
What's the game plan for playing together?
A service blueprint is where the different views begin to operate as one system — connecting the experience people have with the actors, activities, processes, systems and dependencies required to deliver it.
A concise representation of the overall service and major stages for leadership understanding and decision-making.
A collaborative service-design view connecting actors, experience, activities and major operational dependencies.
Detailed workflows showing how work moves through roles, processes, systems, state changes and evidence.
The views served different purposes while describing the same underlying service. This allowed teams to move from 30,000-foot understanding to operational detail without losing the relationship between the two.
At the operational level, the blueprint becomes more than a visualization of the experience.
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Inspectable
Each meaningful step can be inspected through the work performed, the state change it creates.
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Traceable Evidence
The evidence that confirms it occurred, the supporting technology, ownership, risks and associated measurement signals.
I treated these artifacts as boundary objects: shared representations that allow leaders, product teams, researchers, designers, operations and technology teams to inspect the same service from the level of detail they need.
The L1, L2 and L3 blueprint formats became Ontario Health enterprise standards, establishing a consistent foundation for service planning and standard operating procedures across new program initiatives.
07
VOC & MEASUREMENT
How well are we playing — and how do we improve?
A journey should be measurable.
Understanding what happens is only one part of Journey Management. Organizations also need to understand how well the journey is performing, where friction is emerging and where intervention may be required.
I developed a consolidated VoC research and measurement approach connected to identifiable stages and moments within the service, rather than treating VoC as a separate research stream.
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Experience Evidence
What are people telling us?
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Behavioral Evidence
What are people actually doing?
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Operational Evidence
What is happening within the service?
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Outcome Evidence
Is the service producing the intended result?
Measurement becomes more useful when a signal can be understood in the context of where it occurs in the journey, which actors are affected, and what operational activity surrounds it.
The implemented 7-stage measurement plan connected patient and clinician journeys, 5 operational personas and service metrics to inform experience improvement priorities.
WHAT THE 7 STEPS ENABLE
From artifact production to Journey Management.
The seven steps are not seven isolated deliverables. Their value comes from the connections between them.
This changes the question from “Is the journey map finished?” to “How will the organization keep its understanding of the journey current and useful as the service changes?”
It also makes the artifacts decision-grade: executives can look for major experience and operational risks; product teams can examine priorities; operations can inspect what happens when a state changes; and researchers can see what is known, what evidence supports it and what still needs investigation.
GOVERNANCE
Visible. Inspectable. Sequential. Actionable.
As the number and complexity of artifacts increased, consistency itself became an important design problem.
See the System
Can people see the important actors, activities and dependencies?
Go Deeper
Can teams examine the underlying detail when they need it?
Follow the Work
Can people understand how work progresses through the service?
Support Decisions
Does the artifact help someone make a decision or take action?
THE NEXT LAYER — AI-ENABLED PRODUCT MANAGEMENT AND JOURNEY OPERATIONS
What happens when the journey becomes queryable?
As journey-management systems accumulate research, workflows, measures, decisions and organizational knowledge, maintaining the connections manually becomes increasingly difficult.
As a proof of concept, I developed a Microsoft Copilot agent to compare versions of structured service blueprints, identify changed workflow steps and affected stakeholders, and generate audience-specific draft communications. The prototype demonstrated how AI could accelerate change-impact analysis while retaining human review and decision-making
That creates an opportunity for AI ... not simply to generate another journey map, but to help organizations maintain and interrogate the journey-management system itself.
What changed in this workflow since the journey was last updated?
Which journey stages have research evidence but no defined measure?
What downstream activities could be affected by this proposed change?
Which insights have not yet been connected to a product or service decision?
What has changed that frontline teams need to know?
The opportunity is to use AI as an acceleration and knowledge layer over a well-understood service system — not as a replacement for understanding the system in the first place.
JOURNEY MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLE
A journey is not simply something to map. It is something to manage.
Journey Management requires connecting customer and employee experience with the operational reality underneath it.
Value + People + Journeys + Workflows + Systems + Research + Measures + Ownership + Decisions
The seven-step approach provides a way to structure that complexity without pretending the work is linear. Teams can move between layers, add evidence and revise the model as the service evolves.
The goal is not to create seven artifacts. The goal is an organization with a shared, evidence-based and continuously actionable understanding of how its service actually works.
MY END TO END & CONTRIBUTION
Product Experience Strategy
Service Transformation and Value Measurement
Journey Management
Enterprise Service Design
Experience Research
Data Driven Decision Making
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Product ROI Framework
Product and Service value framing, organizational archaeology, research planning, synthesis, SME collaboration and validation.
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Journey & Operations
Personas and actor modelling, journey architecture, use cases, operational workflow mapping and service blueprint architecture.
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Management & Governance
VoC and measurement planning, L1/L2/L3 blueprint governance, decision-grade artifact design and AI-enabled journey-management exploration.
What This Work Enabled
A shared, evidence-based understanding of Ontario Health’s eReferral and Central Intake services, connecting clinical journeys, operational workflows, technology dependencies and service measurement. The work established Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 service blueprint standards, and decision-support artifacts to help teams assess service changes and coordinate improvements.