A patient-facing, digital companion app
Discovery and design of a patient facing, digitally supported companion app, bringing together publicly available and approved disease information, therapy area education, support tools to enhance medication taking and direct HCP communication pathway.
The Challenge: Support patients with disease and treatment education, benefits of optimised medication taking thus supporting the long term management and reducing early disease deterioration from poor control.
The Client engaged with Windmill Digital Healthcare, to support them in the patient centricity discovery and design thinking, which enabled an agile innovation design sprint to focus on how the possibility of a companion app could overcome the barriers to greater patient engagement and holistic management of the overall patient disease journey. The proposed solution would encompass patient group validation and ease of use for the intended population. The solution would enable greater patient engagement and disease management through approved publicly available collateral, such as educational materials, videos, and links for further reference material suitable for patients.
Why the client chose Windmill Digital Healthcare
Windmill Digital Healthcare was enlisted to design the front-end solution, due to their excellence in digital design in the healthcare sector from their demonstrable comprehensive understanding and conduct of user experience and deep rooted discovery in complex stakeholder settings with patients and health care practitioners (HCPs).
Combined with the domain experience within the pharma Digital Health and DTx NHS buyer space, demonstrated the multi-disciplinary capability required for design success.
Previous projects delivered, demonstrated the ‘heath care value add’, that a healthcare app can have on disease management and the use of complex data analytics to enable patients and HCP’s to see the correct information based on their disease diagnosis and symptom management.
To enable the correct data inclusion into the patient app for expected functionality of the product, the WMD team conducted a detailed data acquisition plan, to identify, collect and organise the input data from approved open and publicly available data to form the patient facing knowledge & education data sources library, for enabling the app capability and visualisation.
The UX/I and Product team at Windmill Digital Healthcare were able to successfully design and develop the front end of the patient facing companion app MVP for transfer to the client’s chosen development team certified in the full back-end build requirements for DTx ISO 13485.
In addition to the design, the WMD AI team devised a AI-powered additional services model for further enhancing the solution. This included AI-powered recommendation algorithms to deliver personalized content, educational materials, and support resources to patients based on their needs and progress. This fed into the design wireframes for a personalized content feed based on existing patient data and content library to improve patient engagement via reduction of burden of knowledge assimilation.
The WMD also mapped out an AI framework for a Chatbot-powered Patient Support and Feedback soliton. The proposed chatbot model design aimed to integrate with AI-powered sentiment analysis to answer patient questions, collect feedback, and provide personalized support during clinical trials.
AI service inclusion discussions ongoing.
Impact
The initial product designs captured the requirements discovered during the innovation design sprint, which enabled further agile iteration to create a stakeholder approved, pressure tested, and patient validated high-fidelity designs to meet the needs of the client. The designs catered around the diverse needs of patients and healthcare practitioners, ultimately enhancing patient engagement and facilitating better long-term disease management.
Through a comprehensive understanding of Digital Health and patient-centric design thinking, Windmill Digital Healthcare successfully navigated the challenges of supporting patients with better disease education and medication adherence, thus providing a suitable application for a digital therapeutic (DTx) app.
