Building A Cutting-Edge Healthcare Experience

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DIGITAL HOUSE CALLS

Care Innovations® is an award-winning healthcare technology system for delivering care beyond the traditional walls of medicine through remote patient monitoring, digital therapeutics, telehealth, Healthcare PaaS and SaaS, and population health. User-centered, simple processes allow payers and providers to utilize remote care on a much greater scale.

Care Innovations® extends care into the home with a robust technology platform, workflow integration, and logistical management. The resulting program helps payers, providers, pharma, home care, and other health systems lower costs 50%, lowers rehospitalization rates 26%, and provides higher quality care via remote care delivery with a 97% patient satisfaction rate.

The Care Innovations suite of projects resulted in an award-winning, life-changing healthcare system that is considered the world's most accessible, user-friendly remote healthcare monitoring solution.

As UX Manager, I had the privilege of building a talented team, guiding user experience, usability, and research, to conceive and produce a completely new platform that established standards for remote care software. Cutting-edge methods were used to collect, aggregate, and analyze data to provide informed insights and define processes to make Care Innovations a reality.

First in telehealth. Setting the gold standard for remote care management.

Intel-GE Care Innovations, was a joint venture between Intel Corporation and GE Healthcare, which connects the care continuum to the home and makes it easier for patients, family caregivers, and professional caregivers to interact and achieve better health at home.

Experts in technology and behavior change worked to develop the world-class Health Harmony software platform and hardware products for this first-of-its-kind telehealth venture, which set the gold standard for remote care management.

Care Innovations provides a product suite that includes activity sensors, health monitors, and software solutions to help caregivers collaborate with care professionals to conveniently manage health care at home.

The project identified the best methods for health care providers and health plans to capture and integrate real-time data from the home into care delivery. My work included development of the company's remote care management solution, which delivers insights for timely intervention and superior patient engagement with patients outside the formal care setting.

The platform is built with a smart filter and predictive analytics that sorts the complex array of aggregated data captured from a wide array of sensors and sources present in the daily lives of patients.

THE CHALLENGE

BUILDING A HEALTHCARE EXPERIENCE BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL WALLS OF MEDICINE

The platform needed to be a remote care management solution that employed not only advanced telehealth technology, but also a comprehensive range of data analysis to provide caregivers and healthcare providers a better understanding of the needs of their patients — as well as the solutions to meet those needs.

MY ROLE & LEADERSHIP

CREATE A VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF REMOTE PATIENT MANAGEMENT

My role as User Experience Manager was to lead an Intel User Experience Team dedicated to creating the Care Innovations' platform, and better outcomes for patients, customers, and other stakeholders across the entire healthcare ecosystem. I had the privilege of building a talented team, guiding user experience, usability, and research, to conceive and produce a completely new award-winning platform that established standards for remote care software.

My responsibilities included guiding the user-centered design process for Care Innovations, blending business and user goals to create an ideal remote patient management platform that could be continuously improved and refined through patient, physician, and caregiver feedback.

My activities included leading a team that collaborated with a group at GE Healthcare to conduct several user studies and hospital trials. The data gathered from those studies drove innovation for this large-scale, enterprise-class venture that brought stability to business and clinical transformation efforts.

My significant contributions included:

  • Scoping and prioritizing customer experience activities based on business and customer impact.
  • Collaborating with engineering teams to deliver on-time, within budget products that met business goals.
  • Serving as a customer experience evangelist to build awareness and understanding, and drive product launches.
  • Hiring and managing the user experience teams and product design functions.
  • Leading, coordinating, and running multiple tracks of work independently and in conjunction with key project team members.
  • Conducting discovery activities to define high-level user journeys, then identifying key features and capabilities needed.
  • Producing user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and design specs to communicate detailed designs and solutions to guide development sprints.
  • Using documentation, reviews, and presentations to communicate clear and compelling ideas to a wide range of key stakeholders.
  • Championing each user group throughout the build by continually promoting human-centered design methods, including research, validation, and the inclusion of user feedback.
  • Working with multidisciplinary teams and consistently promoting active collaboration, co-creation, and continual alignment, while building close relationships with customers and key collaborators.
  • Conducting design validation and user testing with end-users, inside and outside medical environments.
  • Identifying issues and resolving conflicts within the project team.
  • Generating detailed final design specs that inspired accurate developer builds.
  • Working with technical teams and regulatory experts to deliver a polished final product that met all regulatory and privacy standards.
  • Promoting and educating others on new interface guidelines and design patterns.
  • Creating expansive designs for all user groups; advocating for accessibility, encouraging product and engineering management to prioritize accessible features.
  • Continually striving to set a higher standard for the overall quality of design and design artifacts.

STRATEGY & INSIGHTS

ENGAGE PATIENTS WITH A REMOTE CARE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

The Intel - GE Healthcare Care Innovations project was an opportunity for user experience and product design professionals to research and build new healthcare experiences from start-to-finish.

Simplified Remote Care Management

Care Innovations simplifies planning and deploying remote care management by providing intuitive and easy-to-use technology and a device agnostic platform for the clinician, patient, and family caregiver.

I was responsible for gathering and analyzing data to gain a deep understanding of customer experience issues, identifying product gaps, and generating new ideas to fill gaps and improve customer experience.

My activities included leading idea-generation and project vision sessions to develop product enhancements, then working with cross-functional teams to build new features, from concept to hi-fidelity prototypes.

I also worked closely with stakeholders to understand customer needs, explain new features, and advocate for product solutions that were designed, developed, implemented, and continuously improved to offer best-in-class healthcare experiences.

The Intel Health Guide was the first hardware product designed for a mature market, where it could be put in a home environment.

The Intel Health Guide and Care Innovations software platform was the foundation for the Intel - GE partnership. I directed field studies, ethnographic studies, contextual inquiries, and other data gathering activities. I analyzed the data and used the insights gained to drive the design thinking process to ultimately create the entire product suite for patients, physicians, and caregivers to extend the care continuum into the home.

The technological solution appeared simple: a remote patient monitoring system that allows home care for the elderly. But what was not simple was working with the televisual and telephony technologies that already existed to 'fit' into the context of 'independent living'.

To create the appropriate enabling technology, Intel Health had to come up with a product design that offered a form of literacy appropriate for a generation of people who probably wouldn't have the need for a personal PC at home.

The end result, the Intel Health Guide and Care Innovations software platform, was a culmination of design, engineering and ethnographic research work spanning several years, and involved input from stakeholders and patients between 65 to 80 years old — some living at home, some living at the hospital — and also their caregivers and clinicians.

Looks Do Matter

It was no accident that the Intel Health Guide had the outward appearance of a typical household appliance. Insights from qualitative research showed a high percentage of patients did not want the equipment to look like a medical device. They didn't like the stigma of being perceived as ill. The UX team had to factor in design considerations to address these concerns in developing the Intel Health Guide and Care Innovations platform.

One of the major issues addressed in the design of the interface was the elderly patient's deteriorating eyesight and lack of dexterity in their movements. The key was to have the instruction on the interface easy to read and operate.

The product design necessitated a simple touchscreen set of buttons for navigation. The fonts and buttons were kept large since elderly patients don't have the same manual dexterity as younger people. The buttons were designed large so that they could tap the screen with their knuckle instead of the tip of their finger, for example.

The Intel Health Guide and Care Innovations platform also had a limited set of icons carefully tested for usability. The product design provided high contrast in the colors, since usability testing determined blue and white worked best for the vision of older patients.

The device and software also had to adhere to current medical device regulations, so the personalization of the user interface was limited. It was a medical device designed to carry clinical content which had to be verified and validated. What could be shown onscreen had to adhere to the privacy and data requirements determined by the health and privacy regulations.

Another challenge for Intel Health was to make the system socially amenable, by enabling interactions among the patient, the family and friends, the caregivers, and the clinicians.

Visuals were an effective means of maintaining this form of sociality, so the device incorporated audiovisual communications, such as video, that could run on wired, cellular or dial-up connectivity.

In order to understand how the device would work for the clinicians, UX research included personal interviews, observing clinicians at hospitals, and contextual inquiry, to understand the workflow and the work-situated problems they faced.

A new system was added to the Care Innovations platform as a direct result of customer feedback, needs analysis, solution ideation, and robust field studies. As part of the Care Innovations remote patient monitoring platform, QuietCare, smart sensor technology passively monitors patient activities and provides this data to physicians and caregivers.

RESULTS

A NEW ERA OF TELEHEALTH

The Care Innovations project advanced remote patient monitoring technology and has given healthcare providers unprecedented opportunities to better manage the health of patients with chronic conditions.

The telehealth technology used to deploy remote care management also works to reduce costs by better engaging and educating patients, promoting adherence to treatment and early intervention to keep readmissions at a minimum.

Care Innovations transforms traditional telehealth and remote care monitoring models to deliver a solution with comprehensive benefits to caregivers, clinicians and patients. The most striking benefits of Care Innovations remote patient monitoring technology include:

  • LOWER COST. Deployments are as much as 50 percent lower than device-centric remote care management programs.
  • GREATER SIMPLICITY. With far less complexity than traditional dedicated telehealth devices, payers and providers can utilize remote care on a much greater scale with relative simplicity.
  • MORE ACCESS. Caregivers using the Care Innovations platform are given access to an innovative suite of caregiving tools, enabling them to add informal caregivers like family and friends to their supportive care network.
  • BETTER ENGAGEMENT. Care Innovations provides more frequent touchpoints among clinicians, caregivers, patients and their families. Studies on a variety of health conditions, such as strokes, show that patients with active family caregivers are more likely to improve than those without.

Care Innovations made telehealth technology a cost-effective valuable tool by helping move delivery of care from higher acuity settings to the home. It allowed patients to become more proactive in their own health and facilitate effective management of their chronic conditions.

In the past, adoption of remote care management (RCM) solutions was slowed by a perception of cost and complexity. Care Innovations' solutions removed those limitations by delivering an intuitive and innovative remote care management platform that reduces the cost of traditional RCM models by as much as 50 percent.

Removing the complexity of remote care — not just for providers and caregivers, but also for patients, gives them greater freedom and flexibility to participate in their own care.

Care Innovations enables the collection and transmittal of daily biometric data, collection of health assessment information, and monitors changes in existing health patterns.

Patients, caregivers, and family members all have access to clinician-directed health sessions, videoconferencing, and interactive education to help keep all parties engaged.

BUSINESS RESULTS

  • Patients using Care Innovations are significantly more engaged
  • Costs with the Care Innovations platform are reduced as much as 50% over other remote care management programs
  • User-centered, simple processes allow payers and providers to utilize remote care on a much greater scale