Optimizing
health appointments
Introduction of a web app to increase efficiency and empower medium risk patients in the treatment for their chronic diseases.
Oct 2018
Type
Service Design
UI/UX Design
Role
Researcher
Concept Development
Prototyping
Authors
Soledad A., Florencia A.,
Francisco B., Patricia E.,
Antonia H., Fernanda R..
The chronic patient dilemma
In Chile, patients with chronic diseases are classified into different risk groups depending on how many different diseases they have. Medium risk patients are those with four chronic illnesses or less. Most of them have more than one, which means they have at least two treatments they have to follow for the rest of their lives. This includes medication, exercise, diet changes and a constant commitment to regular medical checkouts.
The objective of primary care today is to empower patients so they can self-manage and attend less frequently to their checkouts, but there are few patients that actually do this.
Problems like lack of incentives, waste of time, system inefficiency and others, make that patients miss their appointments, or if they go, waste their time because they forget or don’t know the reason why they have the appointment.
User Journey of a patient
Patient that does not go to all appointments, either forgets or doesn't see the purpose.
Analysis of the user journey
One of the big problems we saw by analyzing the journey map of a chronic patient, was that the pre-service and post-service were too short and lacked contact with the health center, in relation to the actual service.
We proposed that if we added touchpoints to the pre and post-service, we could optimize the actual service time, by also engaging and empowering more the patients in the course of their treatments.
We designed a WebApp which objective is to add touchpoints to the service before and after the doctor's appointment, which include reminders, tips and practical things the patient can do. The purpose is to empower the patient in it's treatment, but also solve some of the inefficiencies of the system today.
New user journey
Considering the introduction of the new WebApp service.
The new journey shows how the pre and post-service have increased the number of touchpoints between the health service and the patients, which in turn optimizes the time spent in the actual appointment.