INTRODUCTION

University of Chicago Medical Center is scheduled to roll out a new type of healthcare delivery mechanism called Hospital at Home in January 2023, with the first pilot in November 2022. UCMC is partnering with the Institute of Design to explore the communication opportunities such a new experience would offer to patients and caregivers.

MY ROLE

SMEs Interview, Research Synthesis, Information Design, Prototyping
Co-design Workshop Facilitation

TOOLS

Mural, Adobe Creative Suites, G-Suite

THE TEAM

14 designers from Communication Design Workshop Fall 2022,
Professor Tomoko Ichikawa and Kim Erwin

TIMELINE

August - December 2022

THE PROBLEM

Zoe finds it difficult to choose whether to proceed or not with the Hospital at Home program due to lack of understanding and confusing information.

AGE:

LOCATION:

STATUS:

HEALTH CONDITION:

PRIOR SITUATION:

Englewood, south side of Chicago

Living alone

Congestive Heart Failure and has been having a hard time breathing

spent more than 12 hours in the ER waiting for a bed at Mitchell Hospital, which made her feel annoyed and uncomfortable.

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THE SOLUTION

Understanding the context

PRIMARY RESEARCH

Questions we asked during the interview:

  1. How is a HAH Triage Nurse different than an ED Triage Nurse?

  2. How long are patients given to decide to participate?

  3. What happens if a patient does not have a caregiver?

  4. What are the role and responsibilities of a caregiver?

  5. How long does the prep for transition home take?

  6. How is the home care plan being communicated?

  7. How do patients learn how to use the technology (ie. tablets/iPad)?

  8. What can the patients do if there is a problem or issue arises when they are at home?

GLOSSARY REPOSITORY

Making sure we understand and use the same language as the University of Chicago Medicine

ON-SITE UCHICAGO MEDICAL FACILITIES VISIT

Experiencing what is it like from the journey when the patient was sent to the ER to when they are recovering from at the hospital bed.

The Approach

ANALYSIS OF PRIMARY RESEARCH

To gain a better understanding of the Journey Map, we divided the experience into three main categories:

  1. Introduction + Orientation

  2. Prepare + Transfer

  3. Enactment

Introduction + Orientation

The moment when the patient and the caregiver first get exposed to information about the Hospital at Home program.

Enactment

The moment when the patient and the caregiver are receiving treatment and care from the University of Chicago Medicine Hospital at Home program.

SECONDARY RESEARCH ON PATIENT EDUCATION MATERIALS AND ASSESSMENT TOOL

Information and content placed in any type of medium in the healthcare environment play an important role for the patient and the caregiver to ensure they find, understand and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.

objectively assess the suitability of health information materials for a particular audience in a short time.

SAM

evaluate and compare the understandability and actionability of patient education materials.

PEMAT

Summary of Health Literacy Requirements

Suitability

Including images that are more inclusive

Understandability and Actionability

Adding appropriate visual cues for important info

Readability

Making sure the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is below 6

Coming up with possibilities

SCENARIOS

TIME POINT 6.6

When the patient and caregiver receive the

Hospital at Home health monitoring kit

TIME POINT 6.7

When the nurse navigator reviews the roles and responsibilities of the caregiver and the home care plan for the patient

PROTOTYPES

There is a total of 6 different prototypes ranging from video to brochures and booklets. The class is then divided into 6 teams to work on the prototypes.

Program Overview Video

Overview of Hospital at Home Pamphlet

Everything you need to know about Hospital at Home

Escalation Document

HRS Tech Pack

Caregiver Scheduling Booklet & Daily Checklist

Rethinking the content

Goal: To determine whether the content provided is important and makes sense to the participants

CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP

Card Sorting

rank each card into 0: I don't care, 1: I care somewhat, and 2: I care a lot.

Open response

write down what kind of questions should the tablet ask when using it at home.

ANALYSIS

Key Learnings from the workshop

Based on the card sorting result, the majority of the participants think the following content is most relevant.

  1. Hospital at Home nurses are specially trained to give hospital-quality care in the home

  2. Hospital at Home is for people who have a family member that can help each day

Reviewing the materials

PATIENT PANEL

Real-time Feedback from the patients at the University of Chicago Medicine Hospital

  1. Select a more diverse set of images

  2. Prefer watching the video before looking at the pamphlet

  3. Prefer line art compared to photos

Suggestions from the legal and health literacy team at the University of Chicago Medicine Hospital

  1. Add fluid intake information as one of the daily task

  2. Remove repetitive content

  3. Add visuals for preventing falls at home section

STAKEHOLDER REVIEW

The Impact

USABILITY TESTING

Testing the overall program experience with a real patient in the form of Day in a Life documentation to identify additional gaps and needs

University of Chicago Medicine’s Community Health Workers are able to do a test run using
the tablet and other devices while following the instructions from the health monitoring kit that
we developed.

LESSON LEARNED

Challenges we face

Not enough time to make iterations within the team

Decisions from stakeholders can be unknown and uncertain

Clear communication and delegated tasks to work more effectively and efficiently

Learned how to work in adaptable manner as changes approach

Afraid of making mistakes and having to start everything over

Actions we took

Changed the mindset to fail faster and get feedback sooner