By KarI Y. Snyder, MFA
How to encourage hospital patients to properly handle their at-home recovery journey? Recovery Network & Broadcast Systems sought to decrease hospital readmission rates through better patient education. The entire system involved internal and external servers, patient bedside in-put to LG TVs, a mobile app, a website and a nurse desktop admin. My role focused on designing the patient mobile app and website experience to tie into the LG TV system and the nurse's desktop admin.
- Product Designer
- UI/UX Design
- Journey Mapping
- Wireframing
- Information Architecture
- Interaction Design
- Video (Film & Edit)
- Photography
- Jon Lindgren, Producer
- Capella Solutions Team (programming)
- 8 months
-Adobe XD
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Premiere
- LG TV API
- HTML, CSS, Javascript
The branding for the project as well as patient personas were already in place when I was added to the team. Thus, my focus was aimed at the product design and interactive connectivity of the patient experience via a mobile app and website.
Recovery Network & Broadcast Systems started within the hospital. Patients first engaged with it at the bedside via their hospital remote that connected to LG TVs. These TVs were connected to an internal server that ran video education along with live events, such as religious services.
I had never built an app for an LG TV before and I ended up tracking down a specialist who helped myself along with the project producer to understand the limits and options available. It turned out there was very little that could be done to change the UI for the brand of TV the hospitals most often purchased. Since font options and styling were so limited, most of what I did was catalog all the videos for the system, set up a JSON file for easy changes to video playlists and created still images for all the video categories.
For the mobile app and patient website, I mapped out potential user flows and collaborated with my team to get the experience right. Next, I turned initial flows into low fidelity wireframes to continue working out the user experience and information architecture of the application.
Designing any type of interactive project is always more tricky when dealing with heavily regulated industries such as health care with its HIPAA patient privacy regulations.
Outside of patient data protection measures, a designer also has to take into account multiple languages, cultural cues (for iconographics), all ages of users (style of app) and the health of users (font sizes and easy navigation).
This project was very unusual in that the mobile app required that a user have signed up within a hospital. Although a person could download the app, content was locked out until the user was assigned a recovery journey at the hospital by a nurse.
A recovery journey consists of a mix of Life Stories, Patient Education and local Resources that a nurse assigns to each patient. Life Stories are filmed, short accounts from patients who have recovered from an illness. Patient Education videos are medically vetted content. Recovery resources are local services and providers who can provide a patient with equipment, counseling, services and whatever else is needed.
I designed the resources to auto populate providers based on a 50 mile radius around whichever hospital the patient was originally assigned content. This kept the content down to the needs of the patient rather than an overwhelming nationwide data base to sort through. Additional search criteria included the options of Price, Insurance type, and Out/In Patient care.
Another unique feature to this app was that the patient account automatically expired based on the care schedule of a persons recovery journey. A forced deadline encouraged the patient to view all materials in a timely manner.
Outside of product design, I also created various infographic illustrations to show how the system worked. For marketing, I booked actors to act as patients and assisted in filming and photographing various uses of the system at the Sugar Land location of CHI St. Luke's hospital. Having an interactive online mobile app prototype was especially important for filming. Although the UI was not a final version, the actors were able to navigate the app as if it was real and it helped to sell the concept in the video as well as to hospital executives.
Recovery Network & Broadcast Systems was launched in numerous Texas based CHI St. Luke Hospitals with the goal of growing into a nationwide service.
“As a paid consultant and contract producer, Kari's assisted me in a number of projects that benefited my company and my clients with a number of professional services including broadcast producing, web development, mobile app development, print design, and more that benefited my company and my clients.”
