Good Reads in Healthcare UX #hcux November 15, 2010

A few quick links fo you this morning: This is the first of what may become a bi-weekly series of articles with direct impact on Healthcare User Experience. In this weeks post, some thoughts on design for behavior change, on how tablets specifically iPads are changing the delivery of care, a call to action for well-designed consumer health care devices, the impending explosion of ‘telehealth,’ and the possibilities enabled by availability of patient data. Enjoy.

• Emotional Automation: Bonding with Technology to Improve Health « The cHealth Blog

  “During a keynote panel discussion at the Connected Health Symposium last week, I proposed a new idea that challenges the need for face-to-face doctor patient interactions to deliver quality care. Here’s a synopsis of my remarks”

• Healthcare IT Consultant Blog: Specialty Article: How the iPad is Changing Mobile Health Care

  “Part of that success in the workplace is due to health care professionals interested in deploying the iPad as a telehealth mobile computing device. Even before the iPad hit the market, some hospitals had ordered dozens of units for large- and small-scale pilot programs. In places where the iPad wasn’t initially considered by mobile IT departments, doctors purchased their own and brought them into the office and began carrying them on their rounds at hospitals. ”

• TEDMED: Walt Mossberg Calls For Focus on Consumer Medical Tech – Health Blog – WSJ

  “The WSJ’s consumer tech columnist Walt Mossberg has some health problems, namely diabetes and heart disease, he told the TEDMED crowd last night. And he’d really like it if the same kind of innovation he writes about could help out people like him.

  “As we get diseases that [can] be managed, we need to take the kind of technology that’s in this,” he said, holding up his Apple iPad, and “put it into the hands of consumers to maintain their health or manage disease.”

• TeleHealth Still Waiting… « Chilmark Research

  “Indeed, it does seem inevitable that at some point in time telehealth will take hold as the current system of care continues to spiral in a chaotic unsustainable trajectory. Something has to change, something will change and the technologies discuss at this event will be a part of that future equation. The multi-million if not billion dollar question is when.”

• Stephen J. Downs: Why I Want a Blue Button

  “It’s a simple practice: when a patient logs in to her account, provide a highly visible, clickable button to download her records in digital form. As Dr. Diamond noted, the federal government has taken a leadership role in modeling this practice. The Department of Veterans Affairs started providing blue button downloads to all patients of the VA system back in August and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a similar blue button service for all Medicare beneficiaries. And their efforts have not gone unnoticed – more than 60,000 veterans have downloaded their medical data since the launch.”

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Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables

Now that a couple weeks have gone by, I thought I’d put together a quick overview of a couple of the most compelling panels of the Health 2.0 conference–the ones that actually stuck with me. One session in particular was memorable and worth revisiting.

The session was entitled Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables and focused on some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex.

Susannah Fox, of the Pew Internet Project, was the curator what of what she called the “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” panel and kicked it off with the admonition to live well, love yourself and others. She framed the conversation around some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex. This session had five of the most compelling presenters of the entire conference.

Ron Gutman of HealthTap

Ron asked the question: “how can we engage people in health?” and went on to talk about how a focus on user experience was critical to ensuring actionable results. Games, he pointed out are successful at motivating people because of their inherent milestones, goals and measurements. “Real life doesn’t have this platform” he observed, possibly shedding some light on what HealthTap is up to.

Richard Tate of HopeLab

The HopeLab product, Zamzee is a compelling social game that encourages young people (again with rewards, notifications, and other social game mechanics) to engage in physical activity to combat childhood obesity. HopeLab’s mission is to use make health engagement fun for children in order to build positive behaviors.

Doug Solomon, CTO of IDEO

IDEO was given a communication design challenge (I forget the agency that commissioned them) to reduce unwanted pregnancy in the 18 – 29 year old population in California. Doug described their design brief as “changing behavior in the face of one of the most powerful biological urges on the planet.” bedside.org gives a glimpse of the campaign they developed.

Ramin Bastani, Founder, Qpid.me

Ramin had the best one liner: “Spreading the love, nothing else.” He demoed their (fully HIPAA compliant!) product designed to provide a secure (but sharable) registry of STD test results that a user can share with a potential sexual partner via text message in the moment when they need it most.

Alexandra Drane of Eliza

Finally, Ms. Drane pointed out some of the real-life factors (anxiety about relationships, stress, sex, money, etc.) that keep us from changing our health behaviors even when we want to. Her call to action was to provide support for all of the mental and behavioral factors not just the usual suspects, diet and exercise, if we want to achieve lasting health change.

I took away some key insights from these talks that I’ve been applying in my work in interaction design:

• milestones and measurements can be great tools to leverage to increase engagement and motivation toward a goal
• yes, we should simplify data entry and access to health information, but in order to drive action we need to offer people improved knowledge about their health situation
• we should “meet people where they are” speak in a tone of voice appropriate to the topic, in their own vernacular
• don’t forget to be human. Weed out industry jargon and use plain language.
• broaden our support for the issues that impact a person’s ability to achieve to behavior change, not just the target behaviors themselves
• don’t get distracted by the technology, focus on real human problems and how to solve them.

References

#health2con – Behavior Change Health 2.0 and the Unmentionables @susannahfox

Talk to me healthy, baby – Health 2.0 gets personal

Health 2.0 keynote recap – #health2con

I’m excited to be attending my first Health 2.0 conference today to learn more about the trends in healthcare innovation and meet the hackers, entrepreneurs, industry and government leaders who are driving disruptive change in the healthcare industry. As a User Experience designer, I’m pleased to see such a focus on patient-centered thinking. Here’s a quick recap and interpretation of the presentations I saw this morning.

The first session was a “dueling keynote,” two short presentations by two interesting speakers

• author, health futurist, and healthcare industry advisor, Jeff Goldsmith.
• publisher, Web 2.0 pundit, and “alpha geek” watcher, Tim O’Reilly

Goldsmith started off by talking about what he called the “Innovation Drop” across every sector of the healthcare industry, from medical devices and imaging technology to enterprise and clinical IT to healthcare delivery. In one example statistic, Pharma R&D spending has tripled while new drug introductions have dropped by 2/3 over the past few years.

After establishing his point about stagnation in the industry, he moved on to talk about the Boomer generation and the increased demand they will bring as they age and require more from the healthcare system. He illustrated he point by comparing the receding waters before a tsunami to the coming en masse retirement of Boomer healthcare practitioners. The tsunami’s wave, in his metaphor, will hit when that same population places unprecedented demand on a diminished healthcare system.

Goldsmith ended by stating that the industry needs to rethink its approach to innovation to increase the productivity of the healthcare system. He offered five calls to action.

• Tame the documentation problem in healthcare delivery
• Help both HCPs and patients find information effortlessly when and where they need it
• Accommodate the increasing diversity of HCP and patient needs and styles
• Equip patients and families with tools to better manage their own health
• Entertain and honor the patient

O’Reilly then launched into a talk on how disruptive innovation from outside the traditional healthcare industry is coming to change the way the healthcare system works. He characterized the trend of Web 2.0 companies as those who were able to weather the doc com bust by being the best in their industries at harvesting collective intelligence. To this he added the components that have come to characterize Web 2.0, a focus on cloud computing, data-driven applications, mobile interfaces, real-time information and pushing the Internet beyond the browser and into everyday objects and interactions.

He used the example of the media industry as a bellwether for what is coming in healthcare, adding the point that many currently successful companies will be usurped by new entrants and many will fail before reliable new business models are established. He offered a vision for the future in three specific technological trends: the introduction of tablet computing to the point of care, cloud-based services to unify and manage patient data, and the emergence of sensor platforms like smartphones and other connected devices to reduce the burden of patient-contributed information.

Finally, O’Reilly ended by telling the audience that to truly capitalize on the principles of Web 2.0 innovators should seek to harness the collective intelligence emerging from the introduction of new technologies and make smart use of the “information shadows” that result from our everyday actions.

In the Q&A that followed the keynotes, Goldsmith and O’Reilly outlined two fundamental challenges to idling the infrastructure on which a new healthcare system could be based:

• harnessing medical data and getting it to the HCPs and patients when and where they need it
• simplifying the transactional complexity of the existing payment system in healthcare and moving from a “pay for procedure” model to a “pay for outcomes” one.