We worked to make WeShareCare, a telehealth platform, more user friendly in order to better enable communication between patients and providers. We reconsidered which features are necessary and helpful, and refined those that are and removed those that are not. We addressed language translation issues, investigated what features of telehealth are most important to users, and applied UI design principles to better format the application, including resolving the extreme issues with the question feature, and the inability to view previous chat records or communicate with previous providers. We implemented Human Factors Research methods to investigate how to best redesign. 

WeShareCare

Overview

To redesign a Telehealth application that has a myriad of feature issues, poor interface design, and overall serves the user and stakeholders very poorly.

The Challenge

Working with a partner on this project, we split all responsibilities and collaborated with a sponsor, the founder of WeShareCare.

My Role

Project Schedule

Questionnaire

  • Purpose: Gain insight into patients’ interactions with providers, further understand the context in which patients may use We Share Care

  • Sub-tasks: Creating questionnaire, distributing questionnaire, analyzing questionnaire results

Interviews with healthcare professionals

  • Purpose: Gain insight into how healthcare professionals view the patient-provider relationship and their opinion on the current features of We Share Care

  • Sub-tasks: Develop questioning route, conduct interviews, analyzing interview results

Stakeholder analysis

  • Purpose: Critically analyze and evaluate data from questionnaire and interview to better understand stakeholders

  • Sub-tasks: Summarize results from questionnaire and interviews, apply key points to We Share Care redesign

Competitor analysis

  • Purpose: Gain insight into what design and features competitors and implemented, compare them to We Share Care’s, and see if certain design principles and decisions can be applied to We Share Care

  • Sub-tasks: Research, compare and contrast competitors

User study

  • Purpose: Observe how the app works in context

  • Sub-tasks: Conduct research into previous studies, design study, recruit participants, prepare study materials and resources, conduct study, analyze study results.

The goal of our questionnaire was to survey a diverse group of individuals about their healthcare, and specifically telehealth experiences. In order to create our questionnaire we each individually brainstormed questions and then discussed which were the most useful as a group. We first distributed our questionnaire to a few user testers to give us feedback on it. We got overall positive feedback about the clarity and success of our questionnaire in achieving our stated goals. Any specific feedback we received we implemented in our final questionnaire. We distributed our questionnaire to members of the Tufts community and older family and friends in order to get representative data of a wide age range.

Key Findings

Questionnaire

  • 56% of respondents have a personal care doctor that they see regularly

  • 44% contact their doctor outside of visits

  • 53% say COVID-19 has changed how they interact with providers

  • 38% have used telehealth services before

  • 62.5% use their phone to make medical appointments

  • 37.5% use their phone to access medical records

  • 31.5% use their phone to communicate with a provider

  • The features that were most important to users were: 69% messaging, 69% ease of use, 56% short wait time for communication, 37.5% record storing, 31.5% personalization, 12.5% vital test capabilities

  • Who users feel comfortable receiving healthcare advice from: 94% doctor, 27% pharmacist, 33% nurse

  • Concerns about telehealth services as expressed by questionnaire respondents: “Potential security breaches, keeping health information secure,” “Privacy,” “Safety/not being hacked,” “Consistency of treatment,” “Ease of use of platform and ability to get someone on the phone, if needed”

Interviews with Healthcare Professionals Because our questionnaire was primarily designed to understand the use of telehealth services from the side of the patients, we decided to conduct interviews with healthcare professionals in order to understand what is desired on the provider side of these kinds of applications. We interviewed two healthcare professionals with very different backgrounds in the hopes of learning as much as we could with the capacity to only interview two professionals within the timeline of the project. We interviewed Dr. Kong, a senior pharmacist at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, and Dr. Becher, a pediatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Below is a full transcript of the questioning routes and responses recorded during the interviews.

Dr. Becher stated “I think the longevity of the relationship (how many hours spent interacting over time) has the greatest impact.” The key issues she has observed with telehealth are difficulty with access, slowness of response, discordant availability of providers (timing issues), and difficult navigation/poor design. From Dr. Kong we learned about telepharmacy - consultations via phone or video calls. He explained that people need to be able to use the app without training because hospitals/healthcare providers might not have those resources.

Interviews with Healthcare Professionals

Project management/scheduling, questionnaire design, interviewing, stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis, app flows, essential feature identification, low fidelity sketching, user feedback, prototyping

Key Lessons & Skills

At a Glance

There are three main groups of stakeholders for WeShareCare: patients, providers, and the WeShareCare team and investors. Health insurance companies are increasingly turning to telehealth, a shift that will change the way providers evaluate and treat patients. The use of electronic information and telecommunications technology can help providers reach patients in remote areas and help them diagnose patients with minor illnesses. It can also reduce the cost of care and reduce unnecessary emergency department visits.

Stakeholder Analysis

Patients

Providers

WeShareCare Team

  • Privacy/safety

  • Ease of use

  • Communication (short wait time, easy messaging and ability for phone/video chat)

  • Ability to make appointments to fit in busy schedules

  • Ease of use

  • Sustained patient/provider relationships

  • Information storage/information access (medical records)

  • Work from home part of the time

  • Repeated and sustained use by patients

  • Long term partnerships with providers

  • Satisfaction of patients and providers

After conducting a competitor analysis, as seen below, we found that there are multiple market segments with many types of services, there are competitors with great customer satisfaction, features that WeShareCare does not have (including video chats, medical record storage, appointment making capabilities.) In order for WeShareCare to be competitive in this market it is necessary to implement features like these.

Competitor Analysis

Observed Issues and Proposed Solutions

Preliminary Sketches

Product Flow

The patient interface app flow indicates our prototype screens for patients and the potential paths to them. The login page and homepage are in the same locations as they would be in WeShareCare’s current app flow. On the homepage, patients would be able to choose between the following: (1) ‘Schedule a Chat’, which schedules a messaging, phone, or video chat with a provider, (2) ‘Access medical records’, which leads to a page with all the patient’s medical records, (3) ‘Direct messaging’, which first leads to the ‘Waiting room’, and (4) ‘Leave a note’, which allows the patient to leave a written message for a provider they have previously contacted or a provider who is available. Something to note in our patient interface app flow is that patients can leave the waiting room to access other features of the app such as ‘Schedule a chat’ and ‘Access medical records’ before returning to it. This allows patients to make the most of their time while waiting to contact their provider.

The provider interface app flow indicates our prototype screens for providers and the potential paths to them. Similar to the patient interface, our login page and homepage are located in the same place as they were in the WeShareCare original design. On the homepage, providers can access the following functions: (1) ‘Message’, which lets the provider choose to respond to a patient in direct and instant messaging, or respond to notes that patients have left, (2) ‘View or schedule appointments’, where providers indicate their availability for chats or appointments, and (3) ‘Upcoming & previous patients’, where providers can view patient information and their chat record.

Project Schedule

Prototype

User Feedback

After having users walk us through their experience we asked the following questions:

  • Did you find it to be intuitive and easy to navigate?

  • Were there any features you were confused by?

  • How do you feel about the design (graphics, colors, etc.)?

  • How effective was the app in allowing you to accomplish the following tasks?

    • Access a specific medical record

    • Attempt to enter direct messaging, then schedule an appointment from the waiting room

  • Are there any additional features you would find helpful?

  • Are there any features you think are extraneous / confusing or you would not use?

Questions for Users

Future Suggestions

Based on our research and prototyping, we suggest several actions WeShareCare can take to improve the application for both patient and provider use. These can be separated into three categories: (1) personalization, (2) provider type, and (3) partnerships with providers. Our suggestions mostly pertain to the provider side because we believe that giving the providers an increased ability to engage and change the interface will eventually benefit patients.

Firstly, personalization. Personalization is a broad category, but beyond adding the patient’s or provider’s names as well as the patient’s pronouns, this is an area that can be expanded on. On the patient side, implementing another feature, Invited Viewers, would allow people with authorization to inquire and use the account on behalf of the patient. For instance, parents or caregivers would be able to interact with a provider on behalf of a child. On the provider side, certain features of the app might offer integration with softwares a hospital or doctor’s office uses. For instance, being able to connect the WeShareCare app to the appointment-making software used by a doctor’s office would make providers more accessible, and make the backend work simpler and more convenient.

Secondly, the existence of different provider types. WeShareCare originally separated providers into two categories, general and screening. However, given that the distinction between the two was not discernable on the messaging app, we originally eliminated this feature. However, if implemented effectively, we do feel it would be a beneficial feature for patients and providers alike. After all, a patient with heart issues would benefit from connecting directly to a cardiologist, and a patient with diabetes would benefit from connecting directly to an endocrinologist. But we are cognizant of how difficult it would be to implement different provider types, and believe that until a more comprehensive system can be developed, WeShareCare should not implement this feature.

Lastly, WeShareCare should prioritize partnerships with providers. By establishing partnerships with providers, WeShareCare would be able to create a steady stream of feedback between them and the providers. Through providers, WeShareCare will also be able to conduct user tests of specific features with smaller groups prior to implementation. The ability to get actual patients and providers to participate in usability tests would be extremely beneficial for WeShareCare. Though we have provided some key suggestions for a redesign of WeShareCare, we believe that several areas can be expanded upon, especially in the aspects of (1) personalization, (2) provider type, and (3) partnerships with providers. By giving providers and patients alike more power and the ability to communicate more clearly, WeShareCare can improve the lives of all stakeholders.