mHealth
mHealth
When working with our clients, we search for ways to leverage current assets, core competencies, and new investments to create compelling and monetizable products. Our process evaluates market needs to determine what can be accomplished with existing solutions, what needs to be developed from the ground up, and how to integrate these elements into an innovative ecosystem that fulfills the market need and leverages the technical know-how of our client.
Mobile Impact created this mHealth solution to highlight our process approach while considering a real-world application to address a market need. In this solution we created an engaging one-to-one encounter between healthcare provider and patient with integrated patient monitoring and instant access to medical records.
Role
Product Design, Product Strategy
Objective
Demonstrate a novel, intuitive, and secure mobile solution for doctor - patient interaction.
Background
With the advent of a pandemic, healthcare was nearly brought to its knees, which has opened the door for new approaches to provide access for healthcare. Paramount to this is remotely connecting patients to doctors with safe and reliable mobile communications, information, and immediate or recurring monitoring.
Goals
Demonstrate one-to-one engagement between patient and doctor
Display access to medical records
Provide real-time sharing of medical diagnosis/records
Illustrate real-time remote monitoring of patient metrics
Our Approach
Our approach is outlined as follows, but keep in mind that although defined linearly in a logical sequence, our thinking process is not linear. Our process is flexible and fluid allowing steps to loop back at any time. Also, our Agile approach enables the progressive series of these steps to engage the entire team from the start to create a continuous flow of ideas, interactions, and outcomes.
1.) Discover
The goal of discovery is to explore the vision for the product while collecting requirements, researching the current state of the market to identify competitors, and seeking inspiration to visualize the product. The first step gathers ideas from everyone involved in the project with the goal of gaining consensus.
2.) Strategize
We analyze our observations from the Discover phase and synthesize them to define the critical issues and formulate the challenges to accomplishing the desired solution. This step defines the product and articulates the desired outcomes for the product.
3.) Ideate
The exploration and identification of potential solutions. The primary goal of ideation is to spark creativity, innovation, and approach to the challenges. This process allows our team to consider creative ways and novel ideas to address those challenges and outcomes.
4.) Evaluate
Once the ideas begin to formulate, they need to be assessed to determine if they can reasonably be worked into the solution for the product. It is about turning ideas into tangible products through collaboration and iteration. This is the stage where the user experience comes to the surface.
5.) Interpret
As the user experience comes alive, in this step the solution can be shared to gain feedback and make refinements. The insights gained here may lead us back to reconsider the original problem formulation or to come up with new ideas or enhancements to address usability and other challenging issues. Here, we gain widespread acceptance to continue with the product design.
6.) Define
The final step converges all thinking into a cohesive drive to complete the product. Here, all requirements are defined, usability is known and accepted, and designs are fully laid out to realize the product outcomes and address the challenges formulated in the earlier steps.
1. Discovery
The first step of the project is to gather information. We start by imagining a communication system that leverages mobile devices and understanding what users want, their needs, and the project objectives. The goal is always to make an engaging and safe patient experience.
Goals:
Understand the users’ wants and needs
Understand the market space
Identify the target audience for the platform
Uncover people’s experiences with similar products
One-to-one Patient Engagement
The patient’s experience is about understanding every interaction a patient has with healthcare providers. This starts with ease of access, scheduling, and self-help, to ultimately, direct video interaction with a healthcare provider, to finally closing out the interaction with integrated insurance coverage, pharmacy, follow-up appointments, etc. Understanding this flow of interactions from both the patient and the healthcare providers’ perspective provides strategic insights into the features, functions, flows, and feelings that drives our solutions to a superior experience.
mHealth patient experience:
Preserve the doctor-patient relationship despite physical/remote distancing
Make healthcare more convenient
Increase efficiency
Home monitoring with alerts keeps patients engaged and improves outcomes
Empower patients with self-help options
Increase access to under-served populations
Provide better access to specialists
Integrate insurance coverage, pharmacy, and patient imaging databases.
User Needs
Expressing the users’ goals, values and aspirations will drive design thinking for the solution. These are the most important things people need from this product to accomplish their tasks.
2. Strategize
With an understanding of the market and target audience, we formulate the problems, challenges, and barriers the product needs to solve.
We bring together the goals to provide direction to the design and highlight important features and functions to meet those goals. It is also important to understand industry requirements, especially patient privacy, and records security in this market before moving forward. During this phase, we create business process flows to formulate logical transitions for the design.
3. Ideate
The main goal of the ideation stage is to collaboratively explore a wide range of various potential solutions. We explore concepts for each screen with low fidelity wireframes. This stage of the process allows us to rapidly iterate and craft solutions that are cohesive, while creating initial usability flows.
The most effective concepts are then stitched together to create a sequence of low fidelity wireframes to ensure that those solutions work well on the screen with logical interactions and seamless transitions.
4. Evaluate
Once the low fidelity wireframes are complete, we start to build out the responsive pages with add imagery and client branding.
Visual Design
We ensure that every interaction, visual, and experience within the platform is cohesive and works seamlessly together, as well as adhering to our customers’ branding guidelines. The user experience becomes visible at this stage. In fact, the wireframes will be used as the basis for development where images, structures, boxes/buttons, etc. will be imported directly from our design tools to the software development team.
5. Interpret
Once the wireframes are stable and the user experience is rounding into completeness, we test and interpret the usability of the design to identify potential pain points in the user flows before proceeding with development.
Prototype
To enhance the test and interpretation, for primary task flows, we link those wireframes to create high-fidelity clickable prototypes for usability testing. Conducting the usability testing with the high-fidelity prototype is useful for detecting issues in information architecture and flows that generate friction for users.
Try clicking* through our design prototype below:
Patient Mobile Device Physician Mobile Device
* To use the Figma prototype, click anywhere on either image above. Action areas are highlighted on the click. Click within an action area to move through the prototype links. The prototype allows us to simulate the user experience early in the development process.
6. Define
Refining the solution is a continuous process that evaluates the product’s performance and flow. Even after launching the product, we gain insight into the usability of the product.
Test & Iterate
User feedback is crucial for optimizing the product, developing the next version, and adding additional features. Through the continuous cycle of testing and improvement, we learn how users interact with the product and how we can enrich / improve the design, the customer journey, and performance. By gathering first-hand user feedback, we make informed design decisions and improve user satisfaction in the long run.
Results & Takeaways
In general, common takeaways include:
Create a strategic plan to launch. Sets parameters to manage out-of-scope requests and limits scope-creep that could potentially derail the project. Prioritizes development roadmap to help deliver a quality product in the target time-frame.
Create a core solution and then iterate to add features/functions. Not every feature has to be in the first release. As part of the strategic plan, creating a backlog and grooming will launch products sooner and create successive results over time. Prioritization is integral in evolving a solution into a mature solution.
User testing doesn’t end after development. Design is a constant iteration of improving the experience for the end user. Always find ways to collect and listen to your user’s feedback
Involve engineering upfront. This helps reduce reworks as an upfront understanding of technical limitations or existing architectures will inform our design strategy.
Identify, evaluate, and integrate existing elements to deliver parts of the solution. Not everything has to be new to create a novel solution. System integration with existing elements, whether from our client or a vendor, improves time-to-market, can reduce development costs, and offers unique, new products.
Achievements
Created the concept and design for the end-to-end product including:
Real-time patient monitoring, recording, analytics, and alerts
Features/User interface for one-to-one video interaction between patient and provider
Secure database ecosystem connectivity
Engaging interface to share medical records, set appointments, send prescriptions to pharmacy, and incorporate insurance
Created interactive design prototype to demonstrate solution