Experience Group® Sessions
The purpose of an Experience Group session is to understand, from the perspective of the session’s participants, what success means to these individuals and how that success is enabled or impeded outside of the clinic or embrace of care. Experience Group sessions shed light on what is easy and what is difficult about life with a particular medical condition, chronic condition, or combination of conditions; what needs are invisible or unaddressed; what obstacles impede better health; and what enables success. Individuals or families discuss how they understand and live with their health circumstances, how they handle the demands of their health care day to day, and what they hope for or what they fear as a result of their diagnoses or treatment.
Understanding these dimensions of the patients’ experience leads to insights about unarticulated needs, about obstacles that impede progress, and about the goals that are most motivating. These insights acre actionable. They guide the creation of new services that go beyond coordinating existing services. The innovative services create value by addressing needs and removing obstacles in ways that enable better health outcomes.
All of the participants in an Experience Group session are part of a medically-defined population and are members of a geographic or social population. This means that participants share medical circumstances such as congestive heart failure or Type 2 diabetes and work, live, or worship in a particular company or location. Though participants usually have not met before, their lives have common dimensions because they face shared challenges.
Sessions typically last 90 minutes with eight participants. The questions facilitators ask are open-ended, such as:
What does a good day look like?
What does a bad day look like?
What advice would you give someone recently diagnosed with your condition?
What support works?
How would you describe what it’s like living with your condition?
What are your goals?