UX in Digital Health
Advocating for people that matter in digital health communications.
By Wenjia Zhou | Lead Business Analyst, UX/UI
With the new digital revolution that is hitting healthcare, the potential for innovative change and improved patient outcomes is within reach. Better connectivity, coordination, engagement and patient outcomes are expected from new technologies that claim to make the lives of both care providers and patients better. With things like smart assistants, phones and watches becoming more prevalent in people’s lives, the reach of technology has also become widespread.
The novelty of these technologies may cloud our judgment leading to unforeseen consequences that plague the system with clinician burnout and medical errors that should have been preventable. In most of these instances, these technologies have failed to account for the complete user experience.
“User Experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
– Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen
In user experience design, the users represent those that directly interact with the tool, whether that be clinicians, patients or caregivers and it is those users that are the center of focus. Often user goals may not be aligned with business goals and associated incentives leading to increased tension between technologies and their users. As a result, technology can offer great potential when it comes to making the lives of patients and clinicians better but is a double-edged sword that requires careful considerations regarding requirements, fit, and current pain points. This is where taking a user-centric approach makes all the difference.
Here are some user experience methodologies you can take now to help bring your end-users back into the equation!
1. Create User Personas
Get to know your end-users, not only what bothers them but also their thought process. Some of those things include values and goals which will help us understand how the end-users will think about new products and potential changes in their current processes.
2. Map the Current State
Visualizing current pain points along the user journey will help highlight key areas of opportunity through the clustering of pain points
3. Ideate
Thinking about what possible solutions are possible to address relieve the most pressing pain points and lead to the best improvement in user value
4. Map the Future State
Plan how that individual solution would map to the current situation. Where does it fit in the current user journey and is that new addition seamless compared to the old one?
5. Build and Refine with Purpose
Build for a specific problem and remember to continuously refine and assess your solution with real users.
Healthcare is complex and multifaceted but with the right approach we can bring it into the 21st century. Great patient engagement means great returns. In one instance with a Tier-1 US Healthplan patient adherence program on the MEMOTEXT platform we were able to achieve target objectives for 33% of patients on a CMS STARS innovation project for Statin Use in People with Diabetes (SUPD).
Interested to see how we can help you address your patient engagement needs? Get in touch!