Health Connect
OVERVIEW
Healthcare portals have the potential to substantially improve communications between healthcare providers and their patients. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They can streamline common patient interactions, such as:
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Updating prescriptions
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Requesting lab results
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Scheduling appointments
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Billing
They overcome many of the problems with voicemail:
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Poor sound quality
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Difficulty understanding patient speech
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Failure of patients to provide important information
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No record of contact
For this project, we designed a prescription management subsystem for Health-Connect, a hypothetical healthcare portal. The interactions we designed to allow a patient to manage her prescriptions via a smartphone app, with physician and pharmacist interactions assumed behind the scenes. We selected this subsystem because we hadn’t seen anything like it in the existing portals we studied and because it involved multiple care providers operating in a workflow.
Duration: 6 weeks
Team: Carl Klutzke, Phani Teja Nallam, Evi Odioko
Existing portals tend to focus on features rather than usability, making it hard for patients to set up their accounts, and failing to provide clear and useful information.
COMPARATIVE RESEARCH
FOLLOW MY HEALTH
The Follow My Health portal from Allscripts is patient-focused, with a design that is intended to integrate communication with multiple providers.​
Follow My Health provides many potentially useful features for patients to communicate with providers, schedule appointments, view their medical history, and pay their healthcare bills. However, the execution of all features is generally poor.
IU HEALTH
My IU Health has a clear focus on usability. The interface is simple and uncluttered. It responds to resizing of the browser window. It provides clear instructions on how to get started and how to get help, including an introductory video. ​
It is provider-focused: it is strictly for communication between IU Health and the patient and provides no integration of communication with other healthcare providers.
USER INTERVIEWS
PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT
We interviewed her about communication with patients and pharmacies. When not meeting in person, patients primarily communicate with healthcare providers by telephone. But the healthcare providers are too busy seeing patients to actually take the phone calls, so the patients frequently must leave voicemail messages. Such messages frequently have the following challenges: poor audio quality, patient's accent, identity mistakes, no lasting record, returning phone calls to patients is inconvenient.
TWO DENTISTS
We interviewed them on the functions that must be incorporated in an app or website that bridges the gap between doctors and patients, and helps in better tracking the patient’s history. The following information is taken from their suggestions on what to incorporate in the design. Use the SOAP(an acronym for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) format for both writing notes and presenting patients on rounds. The purpose of a SOAP note is to have a standard format for organizing patient information.
DOCTOR
She gave the information on what must be included in the basic information (similar to SOAP note) which is must so patient can be treated just by looking at this information (without past data) in emergency situations.
The HIPAA regulation for accessing patient data include various rules such as: previous doctor must allow access for a new doctor to access the data; patient data cannot be given to anyone other that medical providers, emergency contacts. So, it’s better to design accordingly.
PATIENT
She enjoys the personal connection she has with her pharmacists, and they remember her and seem interested in her care. She has experimented with mail order prescriptions several years ago but didn’t like it. They didn’t always seem to send the right amount. She’s heard things are better now but she’s not interested.
PROBLEM SYNTHESIS
AFFINITY DIAGRAM
CONCEPT MAPPING
Keywords and Cross-links
BENEFITS
USER JOURNEY
Current Process
Schedule II narcotics require a new printed prescription slip be presented to the pharmacist each month. A patient who is on such a drug for chronic pain must receive the slip in time to take it to the pharmacist and get it refilled before their supply runs out. Ideally the slip would be physically mailed from the prescriber to the patient.
I'm running out of my pills
Hi, I need new prescription for my chronic pain pills
Wait...for the mail.
Okay, we'll send it through mail
Go to the pharmacy where the pills are available
Take the pills after showing the new prescription
With Health Connect
Schedule II narcotics require a new printed prescription slip be presented to the pharmacist each month. A patient who is on such a drug for chronic pain must receive the slip in time to take it to the pharmacist and get it refilled before their supply runs out. Ideally the slip would be physically mailed from the prescriber to the patient.
You have 5 days of Dangatol Tablets remaining.
HEALTH CONNECT
NEW NOTIFICATION