40-80% of medical information is forgotten immediately after discharge.

Many patients are confused about their health care instructions after hospital discharge.


Doctors use the teach-back method to ensure patients understand their care instructions clearly.

What is Teach-back?

Concern for teach-back at home

How would teach-back work at home without doctor's supervision?

The focus of project

How can we implement teach-back method digitally and improve patient understanding at home?

Note: This university project was sponsored by Healthwise (now acquired by WebMD).

TLDR;

We proposed a scalable framework of digital activities that would allow patients to engage with the health information and consequently improve their understanding at home without clinician's presence. This framework is aimed to provide support to clinicians rather than eliminating them from the loop.

Teammates

Falak Khurmi

Xinran Peng

Naveena Pandiarajan

Ruwen Hu

Sanskriti Bhatnagar

Qiuyan Kang

Prachi Katkade

Sponsors

Katya Ivanova

Jason Hessing

My role & insights along "the way"

"The way"

MY ROLE

Assisted in planning the meeting agenda and project related questionnaire.

PROJECT KICKOFF

Started the project with kickoff meeting with sponsors.

To understand project, expectations & deliverables

RESEARCH

It was completely new space for me, so clinicians and nurses were interviewed for their challenges.

Main learnings from doctors & nurses

  1. Teach-back is never a knowledge check.

  2. Using a non-intimidating & simple language is necessary.

  3. Teach-back varies for different types of instructions & procedures.

  4. Make them repeat after few instructions (chunk information)

INITIAL QUESTIONS THAT POPPED IN MIND

How many types of instructions are there?

Is teach-back same for every type?

What about the content from Healthwise?

How can we make a template of activities

1 thing became clear, teach-back is highly personalized.

Personalized based on patient's demographics, medical condition & couple of other factors.

MY ROLE

Majorly worked on Speakout concept. Participated in concept ideation and worked with the team to do whiteboarding session and bring out ideas.

We started exploring 2 concepts - Speakout and VirtualBuddy. And peer reviewed it from 5 different project teams.

We showed both the concepts to our peers in the class and the sponsors to get feedback.

KEY LEARNING

Use of AI was not welcomed as concerns regarding privacy were raised.
Scope narrowing was required because the scope of medical treatments was HUGE.

Hence, we decided to try and implement teach back for just one procedure - colonoscopy.

MY ROLE

Researched steps for "After Colonoscopy" and made the journey map for the same.

Next step was pretty straightforward, understand patient's journey for colonoscopy

We mostly thought in the direction, what were the touchpoints, actions of patients and clinicians?

MY ROLE

Helped in creating the story for storyboard. The key was, to help others easily understand what we had worked on so that they can easily critique our work.

After journey mapping, we built newly iterated storyboards and presented it in gallery walk.

We tried a little bit of gamification in some storyboards to test out what was the feedback.

GALLERY WALK KEY LEARNINGS

Concerns regarding use of digital technologies for elders.

Chunking of information received a lot of appreciation.

Around that time, Healthwise sent nurses interview summaries. This boosted our confidence in the approach to chunking.

We brainstormed some digital activities that one can do after a chunk of information is presented to patients.

We tested this concept with some real users who went through medical checkups recently.

KEY FEEDBACKS

Using their own voice recording for doing digital teach back was appreciated by some and not welcomed by others.

Soon we realized that we can make a set of activities which can be reused by different procedures, making this a scalable solution.

KEY FEEDBACKS

This scalable aspect was loved by the sponsors.

As a deliverable, we made a scalable activity guide, which would help Healthwise designers make more activities for Teach-Back.

Things I learned

There is a big scope for good design in Health-Tech space because transparency, trust and reliability are important for people. This can only be bridged by good design.

Making ‘Family Guide for Student Success’ more successful at IU Southeast

Live

Information Architecture

User Interviews

Usability Testing

Things I would love to talk over a cup of tea!

Design philosophy

Jony Ive

Anime

Music

Shrimad Bhagwad Geeta

Karate Goju Ryu style

Dan Brown novels

Swimming

Trekking to Mt Everest Base camp

Copyright © 2024 Dharam Lokhandwala