JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Participation from clinician stakeholders can improve the design and implementation of health care interventions. Participatory design methods, especially co-design methods, comprise stakeholder-led design activities that are time consuming. Competing work demands and increasing workloads make clinicians’ commitments to typical participatory methods even harder. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated barriers to clinician participation in such interventions.

Objective:

Explore a virtual participatory design approach to conduct brief electronic co-design (ECO-design) workshops with primary care clinicians.

Methods:

We adapted traditional in-person co-design workshops to online delivery and adapted co-design workshop series to fit within a single, one-hour session. We applied the ECO-design workshop approach to codevelop feedback interventions regarding abnormal test result follow-up in primary care. We conducted ECO-design workshops with primary care clinicians at a medical center in Southern Texas using videoconference software. Each workshop focused on one of three types of feedback interventions: social, sociotechnical, and technical. We paired electronic materials and software features to facilitate participant interactions, prototyping, and data collection. The workshop protocol included four main activities: problem identification, solution generation, prototyping, and debriefing. Two facilitators were assigned to each workshop and one researcher resolved technical problems. After the workshops, our research team met to debrief and evaluate workshops.

Results:

Twenty-eight primary care clinicians participated in our ECO-design workshops. We completed four parallel workshops, each with 5-10 participants. We conducted traditional analyses and generated a clinician persona (representative description) and user-interface prototypes. Also, we formulated recommendations for conducting future ECO-design workshops’ recruitment, technology, facilitation, and data collection. Overall, our adapted workshops successfully enabled primary care clinicians to participate without increasing their workload, even during a pandemic.

Conclusions:

ECO-design workshops are a viable, economical alternative to traditional approaches. This approach fills a need for efficient methods to involve busy clinicians in the design of health care interventions.