Enhancing Telehealth
Relationships
Healthcare as a journey of continuous dialogue.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
A rapidly growing trend in the healthcare industry, telehealth has been pivotal in addressing public access to medical expertise and resources, particularly in rural communities. However, a key challenge facing telehealth today is the public perception that the digitalisation of consultations has depersonalised the patient-doctor relationship.
One potential area for design intervention is the touchpoint of long-term follow-up consultations between rural patients and their physicians.
How might long-distance healthcare feel
like a journey of continuous dialogue?
CONCEPT
“Enhancing Telehealth Relationships” is a design strategy that focuses on putting a face to existing telehealth processes.
This digital patient-physician co-journal shows what that might look like: a highly personalised, yet asynchronous form of interaction. Patients are able to maintain contact with physicians during the downtime between appointments in a manner that is engaging, relational, and efficient.
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
'STORE-AND-FORWARD' ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION
Patient and physician interact with each other via short ‘store-and-forward’ video messages, as a more personable form of communication. In the same way anyone would speak to someone else over Skype, the patient would simply speak to the physician as if it were real-time, but this video message is accessed by the physician at a later time depending on the physician’s availability.
PERIODIC TOUCHOINTS FOR LONG DISTANCE MEDICAL RELATIONSHIPS
This form of exchange is not meant to be a substitute for the telemedicine appointment, but rather as a periodic touchpoint for ‘check-ins’ during the downtime from one appointment to another. This touchpoint is viable for situations where physicians check in on how a patient is doing, or if a patient needs to raise concerns or enquiries that are non-emergencies.
POTENTIAL BENEFITS
Such a platform would make it easier for patients and physicians to maintain continuous dialogue during a stipulated period of time, with the following benefits:
- Physicians are able to follow the patient’s narrative, and are likely to diagnose conditions more quickly and accurately.
- Patients feel more personally connected to their physician, and more encouraged by the support rendered by physician.
- Physicians are able to make timely adjustments to patient’s healthcare plan with new information provided.
A deeper personal connection with patients fosters better patient accountability when it comes to appointments, easing the efforts of telemedicine back-end support. In addition, proactive outreach to patients with limited accessibility to telemedicine sites through existing transport services, such as an ‘UberHealth’, can make them feel cared for.
RESEARCH PROCESS
My research was a blend of in-depth interviews (with our main collaborator from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta acting as a proxy for the physicians and patients) and academic studies focused on human factors in telehealth design.
User Stories
This helped to surface factors for why patients were not making their periodic appointments.
Journey Mapping
A mapping exercise with my proxy user yielded a clearer picture of service challenges.
Contextual Inquiry
Observing the teleconsultation raised immediate questions about the sustainability of synchronous interactions in the long-run.
ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS
The research process uncovered two critical insights:
Healthcare needs to be a
journey of continuous dialogue.
Patients were observed to miss their telemedicine appointments not merely because of inaccessibility but also due to the general lack of investment in their relationship with their healthcare provider. Keeping continuous dialogue means keeping up with the ongoing narrative of the patient, especially during the long downtime in between telemedicine appointments.
The ‘human touch’ is about making patients feel cared for, whether in or out of the consultation
When talking about the ‘human touch’ in telehealth, we often find ourselves converging on emulating the ‘face-to-face’ experience as closely as possible (i.e. virtual/augmented reality, haptics, artificial intelligence). However, when patients and caregivers talk about the ‘human touch’, they intuitively spoke about receiving good care, and being reassured that someone is committed to their healthcare.
DESIGN FRAMEWORK
PROJECT BACKGROUND
ABSTRACT
This project is the outcome of a healthcare design studio, in collaboration with Steelcase Health and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The studio primarily involves exploring the ecosystem of telehealth and telemedical services, trends in healthcare technology, and balancing healthcare needs between urban and rural regions. The studio brief is an open one, with the general expectation of a healthcare-based product or service-system as a deliverable. This project was done while on exchange in Georgia Institute of Technology, Spring 2019.
PROJECT DETAILS
Type of Exercise | Individual
Supervisor | Herb Valezquez
Duration | 8 weeks
Collaborators | Steelcase Health, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; supported by Emory Healthcare and TIFT Regional Health System (2019)
Runner-up award for poster presentation held at the 10th Annual Global Partnership for Telehealth Conference, 2019. (Cordele, Georgia)