Why we need an ecosystem in healthcare

The healthcare delivery system today treats patients as they engage with it: on a one-off basis. The health-tech sector is among the fastest growing in the world today, raising the stakes for designing UX for healthcare super high. User Experience in healthcare is an increasingly important topic due the increasing array of systems, devices, patients and providers interaction to diagnose, treat, and manage disease.

By integrating large, heterogeneous data of patients and employing machine learning, it is quickly becoming possible to collect past medical records of the patient and streamline the current information. With information available at all times online, the patient becomes a consumer who has knowledge and interest of the possibilities and circumstances during their medical treatment. With access to their own records and treatment, they can feel involved and therefore better engage with services.

AbleTo, which helps people suffering from chronic illness, sets a good example. A patient with diabetes, for example, will have a minimum of three different physicians on their care team. These physicians may or may not share the same health record of the patient and, thus, may not coordinate care. If that patient is hospitalised, the hospital may have a different care team and use a different health record as well.

This raises a number of concerns and factors contributing to the gap between optimal and current practice which include:

the method of care coordination,

limited engagement with the doctors and care team,

the unavailability of right data to the doctor at the time of patient care intervention, and

patient’s lack of information.

A system that has consumer-focused design and provides personalised experiences in healthcare is needed that helps a doctor and a patient build an ongoing and proactive relationship with each other for a better care and thus enhancing the care experience. This can be done by understanding the process and design of facilitation of data flow for building a strong communication network between them to exchange the most important and relevant information.

Case in point

A better integrated and more comprehensive strategy is essential to achieve pervasive and sustained improvements in the quality of care for people with chronic disease in general practice.

This can be done most efficiently and effectively by understanding and building personas. Also, creating user journey maps are important for enhancing care coordination, management and user experience for both doctors and patients.

User research techniques like user interviews, surveys and questionnaires do the job of mapping the user journey from the point of origin to the destination — and thereby covering the pain points of the stakeholders (doctors and patients) involved at various stages.

Doctor Personas

For this particular case study, the doctors of leading hospitals treating patients with chronic disease were interviewed in context by employing ethnographic research techniques to understand the challenges faced by them during the healthcare process.

Journey map of doctor

With ageing of population and advances in the treatment of chronic diseases, teamwork in the context of chronic diseases needs to be re- examined. Successful chronic disease interventions usually involve a coordinated multidisciplinary care team.

Contemporary medical care often fails to meet the needs of chronically ill patients, even in managed and cohesive delivery systems.

Efficient interventions tend to fail into these five areas:

the use of evidence-based, planned care;

restructuring of practice systems and contributor roles;

better patient self-management support;

increased access to knowledge; and

greater availability of clinical information.

The challenge is to organise these components into an integrated and managed system of chronic illness care.

Analysis of personas leads to the following key goals of a doctor treating a chronic patient:

Patients’ current health profile

Patient history: As it becomes very important in case of chronic illness

Remote/home consultations: Patients have to travel from distant places to get consultations

Management of appointments: Doctors practice at multiple locations

Patient Personas

Patients suffering from chronic illness require medical interventions on day-to-day and monthly basis from multiple doctors. Effective chronic illness interventions generally rely on multidisciplinary care teams. A patient care team is a group of diverse clinicians who communicate with each other regularly about the care of a defined group of patients and participate in that care.

A number of patients suffering from chronic illness were interviewed to understand their behvaiour, frustrations and needs.

Journey map of patient

The emotional dimensions of chronic conditions are often overlooked when medical care is considered. Many chronic diseases require constant repetition of diagnostic tests, and sometimes long-lasting and disturbing procedures, which is why they are often accompanied by continuing psychological problems, the experience of grief, depression and fear.

Doctors may be well equipped for the biomedical traits of care but not for the challenges of understanding the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of illness and health. Patients with chronic conditions often have to regulate their aspirations, lifestyle, desires and employment. Many distress about their difficulty before adjusting to it.

Analysis of personas leads to the following key goals of a patient suffering from chronic disease:

Sharing current and past health information with doctor

View doctors’ rating, specialisations, testimonials and successful cases

Book an appointment

Remote/home consultations

The user journey maps are irrespective of format and can be modified according to the opportunities being addressed for eliminating the pain points of stakeholders. They can help in building a system that emphases on long term relationships built on respect, consistency and trust.

Summary

Although the quality of care for patients with chronic disease is improving in general practice, about half of patient care does not meet optimum standards due to the failure in addressing social and psychological disorders of stakeholders (doctors and patients) involved. Collaborative management of chronic illness is weakened by negligence of emotional and psychological factors in both the patient and doctor.

Successful chronic disease interventions involve a coordinated multidisciplinary care team to deal with the emotional disorders of both doctors and patients. Gaining an understanding of chronic illness will help make these conditions less invisible.

Patients can act as partners in managing chronic diseases. Earlier, patients were generally inexpert and submissive recipients of medical care when acute disease was the primary cause of illness. Now that chronic disease has become the principal medical problem the patient must become a partner in the process, participating actively in almost every decision or action level. The reason being that patients not just deserve to be partners in their own health care but also health care can be delivered more effectively and efficiently if patients are full partners in the process.

Creating more personalised experiences in healthcare UX means users need to become more aware of their overall well-being, and so they become industry consumers. They must understand medical expressions. Enjoyability factors come into play. Consequently, patient engagement research gives a huge plus to creating healthcare products.

There is an increased need to focus more on understanding the patient and doctor experience at a deeper level to solve whatever problems both sides encounter, along with enhancing the overall experience and lowering its costs. The system and design of user journey maps can be used to personalise and improve user experience for both doctors and patients.

Bringing out insights can be helpful for building strong communication network between doctors and patients to exchange the most important and relevant information in real- time using data mining by good user experience and design. While the current practical use of data mining in health-related problems is limited, there exists a great potential for data mining techniques to improve various aspects of health Informatics. Furthermore, the foreseeable rise of clinical data will increase the potential for data mining techniques to improve and enhance the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare in return decreasing the suffering of chronic patients.