JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Developing digital health solutions for complex health service environments poses a unique design challenge. Service models, like transitions from hospital-to-home for older adults with complex care needs, represent dynamic contexts in which multiple user types are working across diverse settings and workflows. Designing digital health solutions for these types of environments requires advancing traditional methods intended to design for the needs of single user groups working in more bounded settings.

Objective:

This study addresses this design challenge by combing Design Thinking and co-design methods to develop a digitally enabled hospital-to-home communication platform to meet the needs of older adult patients with complex care needs, their caregivers and hospital and primary care clinicians who are involved in the transition process. To co-design the Digital Bridge tool, the study was guided by two questions addressed in this paper: 1) How can we translate diverse user groups’ needs into technology features? And 2) Can incorporating a Design Thinking-driven process as part of user-centred co-design help to manage tensions with diverse user groups perspectives?

Methods:

The Institute of Design at Stanford’s Design Thinking approach (empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test) was applied to guide co-design of the tool; leveraging multiple virtual platforms (e.g. Zoom, Jamboards, journey maps), research methods (e.g. interviews, working groups, asynchronous feedback, surveys), and informatics tools (e.g. information flow and business process maps). Working groups consisting of patients and caregivers, hospital and primary care clinicians, and the project’s Citizen Advisory Committee. Working groups engaged in multiple-iterative design phases with the research and design team to adapt two existing technologies into the new Digital Bridge platform.

Results:

Pre-design work involving interviews with patients and caregivers identified nine challenges in the hospital-to-home transition process, including communication barriers, feeling rushed and invisible, and not knowing where to go when help was needed. Challenges acted as design anchors, guiding a series of five working group sessions with patients and caregivers (n=9), five working group sessions with hospital (acute and rehab sites) and primary care clinicians (n=28) and a round of surveys. Needs were mapped onto six tangible design functions and integrated in two separate technology platforms to align to the local digital ecosystems and workflows at two hospitals networks in Canada. Working across user groups, tensions around language and workflow surfaced and were addressed by prioritizing the patient- and caregiver-identified challenges, while maintaining a person-centred lens.

Conclusions:

The Design Thinking approach was useful in guiding the co-design process, however, effective collaboration across diverse user groups required iterative rather than linear movement between stages of the Design Thinking approach. Future co-design projects working across diverse groups should consider embedding shared-empathy activities to manage tensions and develop true person-centred solutions. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04287192; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04287192