Case Study: Patient Engagement
How might we engage health care clients (patients) in more purposeful activities during their regular and often very tedious treatment regimens?
Mind map exploring assumptions, issues and processes during client treatments
Looking for insights
The patient undergoing treatment for a chronic condition is unwittingly forced to behave in a way that ostracizes them from the rest of “healthy” society. The development of a patient journey map (above) uncovered a situation that may appear to be self-evident or trivial on its surface: The future trajectory of the patient’s treatment tends to a cure of their condition, or total remission. The future state of a patient is that of a non-patient, a person not requiring any treatment with a daily/weekly routine: a life that is uninterrupted by any medical interventions. With this in mind, one way to keep patients productive during their treatment is to normalize their behaviour by mirroring what they would do if they did not require any treatment: i.e. Work, learn or play.
The journey above the black line, represents the actions/interaction of patients with the health-care system.
The new steps to be taken when enabling this solution are identified in magenta
This solution focuses on working-age adults but could be extended to younger and older individuals as well, by changing the “task” list and the nature of the rewards.
All people undergoing treatment are referred to as VIPs (Very Important Patients) The patient journey from work/home to healthcare facility (for treatment) is normalized as another “day at the office”.
requirement for implementation
- Wi-fi enabled Smart tablets
- VIP portal, Database design, API design for 3rd party sites
- Database will need to be designed to capture and store a patient’s ID, point accumulation
and redemption history - Consultants / researchers who can source existing online portals with the appropriate task:
e.g. www.usertesting.com (or similar) ; surveys/questionnaires
Client benefits
- Meaningful (they choose the task) and productive engagement (they get “paid”).
- Normalized activity that emphasizes independent task completion over treatment completion (over which they have no control).
- By encouraging partnership with a third party, online platform or vendor already offering incentives for task completion (user testing / survey work et. al.) the healthcare facility would not be financially burdened beyond the initial setup of an API and maintenance of a proprietary web portal and database.