Evantage has been working in the healthcare realm for over 12 years now in a variety of projects. For the past 2 years, we have been working with a large hospital system to redesign the way they care for patients with chronic conditions. We’ve helped them establish and implement standard care guidelines for all providers and staff to proactively monitor and manage people with conditions like asthma, diabetes, heart failure, kidney disease, heart disease and hypertension (high blood pressure). This is a big change for providers, who today generally treat these patients only when they have complications or their condition worsens. (more…)
Archive for the ‘User Research’ Category
Accountable Care Organizations and Patient Engagement
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011How to Work with an Agency to Recruit Participants for User Studies
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010As Lori discussed in the post Recruiting Agency + User Testing = Nirvana, Evantage typically uses a recruiting agency to recruit participants for user studies. Recruiting agencies can be invaluable when identifying and scheduling participants for studies, but I have learned that is important to work closely with them to ensure the participants who are recruited are the ones that everyone intended they be. Likewise, it is important to find a firm that you have confidence in and that has the ability to find the participants you need. Based on my experience of working with recruiting agencies, I have put together a list of tips that you may find useful when working with agencies.
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Personal Health Records Meet Limited Needs of People with Chronic Conditions – Research Study
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010Personal Health Record (PHR) usage remains low, despite conventional wisdom that it could improve the health outcomes of patients with chronic conditions. Evantage Consulting created an internal project to understand the factors that are contributing to the low use of PHRs and evaluate if a caregivers involvement could help drive its use and improve the health outcomes of people with chronic conditions.
Based on the qualitative study conducted with 20 chronically ill patients and/or their caregivers, we found that the caregiver’s involvement in managing a patient’s PHR could drive its use. However the current PHRs meet limited needs of patients with chronic conditions. To drive PHR use and improve health outcomes, patients and caregivers need simpler and more effective PHRs that can fit in their everyday life. The study was conducted in the months of August-September, 2010. All the people interviewed were using one of the available PHRs (Google Health, Microsoft health Vault, a provider-sponsored PHR, or payer-sponsored PHR).
Online Personal Health Records (PHRs): Could caregiver involvement drive PHR use for people with chronic conditions?
Friday, August 20th, 2010Personal Health Records, or PHRs, are health records that are initiated and maintained by a patient. Government incentives to promote adoption and “meaningful use” of EHRs (Electronic Health Records) by physicians has also raised the healthcare community’s interest in online PHRs such as Google Health and Microsoft Vault. A recent California Healthcare Foundation survey revealed that PHRs can empower some people to take better care of themselves, especially people with chronic conditions. However, the growth of PHR use remains low even for this high-potential segment.
Evantage believes that a key component of this issue is the involvement of caregivers in a patient’s PHR. To dig deeper, we are conducting primary research with patients and their caregivers. We want to learn how to improve the design of PHRs to incorporate the needs of patients who have caregivers. We want to learn whether a better designed PHR could empower patients and their caregivers to use it more and experience improved health outcomes as a result.
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Trends in Healthcare and what they mean for designers
Monday, May 17th, 2010What are the key trends in the healthcare industry? What implications do they have on the design solution? If you are a product planner, business analyst or designer you may already be familiar with these questions. Lately, my projects have been focused in the healthcare space. Because of this, I have been studying the key trends and analyzing their implications on the solutions I design. In this post, I’ll share my learning and outline how I use them to guide my design process.
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Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app. I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.” Is this just a fad or is it valid? Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. (more…)
Six Data Points for User Research Documentation
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009As a user experience consultant, I spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading existing user research reports. These reports help me understand the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration. For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that I think every user research report must include.
A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0
Friday, May 22nd, 2009Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.
A template for capturing & analyzing qualitative user experience data
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Until recently, I captured all my data from interviews, contextual inquiries, walkthroughs, and user testing in Word. For each participant, I’d type my observations etc. into a copy of the test plan. At the end I was left with many many documents which I would print out, spread across my desk, and stare at.
I became dissatisfied with this form of analysis. It resists rigor. So during the second to last round of testing I did, I put all my Word notes into an Excel document to make comparisons more effectively. It was lovely. It took a lot of effort with all that copying & pasting, but it was worth it.
Lesson in User Research: Car rental experience
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Last week, as I was driving out of the rental car garage at Minneapolis airport I realized that I did not like the car I had just rented. The windows were getting foggy, it was 36 F and I was still trying to figure out how the vent-control-knob worked. The knob that I found [image 1] was different from what I was used to [image 2]. It had icons on top, instead of around it. It could be pressed and rotated while I was used to only rotating it and it was split in between making me wonder if I needed to be press both sides of it. I tried different permutations and combinations but windows did not clear up. So I decided to roll them down a bit. This was not the interaction I had anticipated. Mentally I had Xed the check box for renting this car again. (more…)
