Enhancing Patient Digital Asthma Care Journey Experience

Process

At the start of the project, it became apparent that the journey as asthma patient is similar to almost any chronic illness journey. With two of our team members having firsthand experience with chronic conditions, we decided to leverage their knowledge throughout the project.

Trend and Healthcare Landscape Workshop

Our initial step involved conducting a workshop within our team to gain insight into the broader healthcare landscape in Finland and any factors that might influence our project and the experiences of asthma patients.

This workshop was structured around the PESTEL (or PESTLE) model. We were able to identify possible factors and megatrends that could influence our project as follows:

• Worsening public health - the increasing number of asthma cases in Finland.
• Climate change.
• The high amount of indoor air quality issues in Finland and its potential impact on the number of asthma cases.
• The rapid aging of the population in Finland.
• Shortage of healthcare workers

Service Path Workshop

Following this, we held another workshop to map out the service pathway. Our objective was to comprehensively understand the diverse stages that patients navigate during their illness journey.what emotions did you experience, and what would you have wished for during different phases of your illness

Using our experience in chronic illnesses, we tried to address the following question: what emotions did you experience, and what would you have wished for during different phases of your illness*?

This process yielded seven distinct phases: initial symptoms, independent information-seeking, seeking healthcare services, diagnosis, familiarizing with self-care, monitoring treatment, and adapting to life changes.

We identified recurring pain points in all stages of the service path as follows:

• Information overload – Patients were presented with a lot of information, making it difficult to find what was relevant to them.
• Uncertainty and worry – Especially before seeking treatment and during diagnosis.

Specific pain points for each stage of the service path:

• Before treatment – Hesitance to seek treatment.
• During diagnosis – Difficulty in adjusting to the new.
• After diagnosis – Need for emotional support

Findings from the workshop can be summarized as follows:

1. The need for support varies individually throughout the entire pathway.
2. Patients require information throughout the care journey, but the same information is not crucial for everyone in the same situations.

Every illness and patient is unique!

User personas

To emphasize the significance of our findings to our client, we decided to create user personas, that would illustrate the paths of two different patients and their individual needs.

Matti, 56 years old:

• Characteristics: Overweight, smokes, and has severe asthma worsened by stress. He struggles to stick to his medication and making lifestyle changes, leading to poor treatment outcomes.
• Needs: Everyday support, accountability and coping skills.

Maija, 34 years old:

• Characteristics: has a healthy lifestyle and is currently pregnant. She responds well to treatment, stays motivated, and actively takes care of herself.
• Needs: Maija seeks information on effective treatments, guidance on managing asthma during pregnancy, and support for her new life situation.

Solutions

Workshop 3

Next, we aimed to address the following question:

How could we facilitate the individual adaptation and need for support of chronic patients throughout different stages of the care pathway?

We categorized the solutions into three categories:

1. Validation and Being Heard
• Encouraging treatment seeking
• Reminding of support services
2. Information Filtering and Guiding to Relevant Information
• Categorization of information and keywords
• Information filtering
• Readability
• Infographics
• Good information hierarchy
3. Interactive and Engaging Services
• Sympton questionnaire and clear follow-up instructions
• Tasks and game-like features
• Sympton diary and trend tracking

We estimated the different solutions using the impact matrix method. It became apparent that filtering and guiding to relevant information had the most impact on the patients experience with the least effort.

Benchmarking

We conducted benchmarking analysis trying to answer the question:

How have patients been more effectively guided to relevant information?

Our findings revealed several effective methods:

• Chatbot
• Search field for key terms such as symptoms, contact details
• Symptom questionnaires and tests providing actionable instructions
• Seasonally relevant information
• User ability to personalize content or automated information filtering within the service
• Reminders and notifications within the service

Illustrating Potential Impact

Through the personas we created earlier, we visualized to our client how the experiences of these different persons could potentially be improved with the implementation of our proposed features.

Matti, 56

• After diagnosis, the application presents a care pathway tailored to Matti's needs
• The application activates reminder alerts for medication and measurements, empowering the patient to take action.
• The service provides Matti with information on how asthma works and how to quit smoking.
• Gamified features and task-reward mechanisms (tailored to Matti's needs) offer a sense of achievement and motivation.

Maija, 34

• After diagnosis, the application opens a care pathway, taking into account Maija's active self-care.
• Maija finds gamified features unnecessary and disables them.
• Later, due to irregular measurement results, the service offers Maija information on managing the asthma during pregnancy.

Benefits of Personalized Experiences for Our Client

• Improved treatment outcomes -> customer satisfaction
• Enhanced user experience: High-quality digital services as a competitive advantage
• Time-saving and efficient information management
• Optimization of content for appointments
• Reliable and accessible information
• Resource savings
• Green and sustainability perspective
• Savings in labor costs
• Addressing healthcare labor shortage in Finland

Ideas and Questions for Further Development and Research

• How could the personalization of the care pathway be utilized in the treatment of other illnesses?
• How can existing technological innovations help in the personalization of the asthma care pathway and information filtering?
• Chatbot, AI, wearable technology
• How much of the service should be personalized?
• Comprehensive user research and testing
• When is personalization of the service too excessive?