Our UX RESEARCH CASE STUDY: Medi-CALL Digital Health Clinic App
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Our team (group 6, consisting of 3 people) chose a Medical App as our capstone project.
MEET OUR UXR TEAM
BACKGROUND
In this COVID-19 pandemic setting, going outside to meet a doctor or even buy medicine has been challenging due to the threat it has brought to one’s health.
Since then, different problems have arisen such as long queues and waiting times in every hospital visit, being anxious and frustrated, and high risks in queueing for healthcare.
RESEARCH STATEMENT
Medi-CALL is a platform that is mainly focused on consultations that will help you find specialized doctors and make appointments online.
We aim to help people find medical care more quickly and seamlessly. It allows patients to book appointments with doctors, and doctors to manage their schedules and income. We intend to develop an easier and faster way for patients to interact with doctors.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE
We want to have a better knowledge of how patients make decisions on medical health check-ups to create a digital health clinic.
We aim for a convenient web/mobile app where anyone can get hassle-free medical consultation and assistance. This study will focus and investigate on our main features that will help patients get immediate assistance and schedule an appointment. On the other hand, our physicians can also get assistance to simplify their day-to-day schedules.
To achieve this, the study objectives will include:
- Our platform offers digital check-in services that allow patients to submit medical forms before their scheduled appointment.
- One of our attributes will give physicians the ability to check a wider range of clinical information, and can easily access and pull up patients’ medical records/history in one click.
METHODOLOGY
IN-DEPTH 1:1 INTERVIEW
We have done in-depth interviews for each participant that suited our screeners’ questions.
A total of 8 patients and 3 physicians have gladly given time for the interview. We have successfully gathered their thoughts, experience, and expectations in both online and face-to-face check-up consultations.
We have chosen a Qualitative, Semi-structured, and Generative-type:
- We opted for qualitative research for the reason that we can fully grasp the user’s real experience. We decided to refine some approaches to qualitative research. Open-ended responses uncover real-life problems as well as opportunities that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
- We chose semi-structured since we prefer interviews that don’t stick to a rigid plan. Instead of asking all the questions, particularly in order, we preferred open or general questions to let the conversation evolve independently. We held a 1:1 interview that looked like a mere conversation between two people, we wanted our interviewees to feel more comfortable and more pleasant to relax and show their real ideas.
- In the generative research method, Where we have generated a deep understanding of our respondents’ motivations, pain points, and behaviors. We encouraged our patients and doctors to provide suggestions for their ideal features on a digital app. The goal of generative research, also known as exploratory or discovery research, helped us identify a majority of the problem statement.
We used Notion to organize our notes regarding this research phase.
For the Participants Overview, here, we gathered 8 respondents to interview based on our criteria:
Key Insights
After our interview, we established four (4) Key Insights to help us
Pain Points
— Availability of Physicians- often physicians will be busy and may miss their schedules, a flexible scheduling and alert/notification system may be in place in the platform.
Long Waiting time
— Queueing is the most difficult part of on-site (face-to-face) consultation; anxiety and frustration are often felt during this time. Even for the online consultation, sometimes we have to wait for the doctor to complete a previous patient before we have our turn.
Familiarity Issues
— Users both face-to-face and online may tend to have difficulty with terminology and even
Data Security
— Safety of personal records are key worry of patients. Doctors sometimes have difficulty retrieving patients’ records from previous consultations or other doctors.
…and here are 2 of what our respondents have said:
Suggestions, Desired features, and add-ons
Customer Support- A team of call center base agents to help patients and doctors in case of need to navigate through the platform
Ease of Use — a highly asked feature that the platform will be easy to use and navigate through, also easy to understand words is very helpful
Payment- a wide range of payment options.
Appointment — scheduling of appointments and flexibility of time slots
Information Data — safe, secure, and easy to retrieve medical history for both doctors and patients.
…and here is what one of our respondents has mentioned:
For Medical Management we have 2 types.
The first one is >> Self- Medicate — People will tend to look for their symptoms through the internet and will look for desired diagnostics
Wellness — wellness apps that help monitor, chart, and retrieve the vitals of patients.
Here’s an example of what ONE of our respondents has said:
(Last but not least) Positive Feedback — is the actual reaction and positive experience on the app that the doctors or patients that we interviewed have used in the past
So the first positive experience is..
- Possible call center
- Accessible through phone and web
- Centralized consultation and payment option
PERSONA
And now it’s time to meet the personas that we encountered during our interviews:
Techy Tina
A technological savvy, she knows her way around apps and web tools. She loves to use health apps to monitor her health and wellness conditions. She is willing to adopt the online consultation idea and is willing to use it. Her concern is data is not being secured and may leak through the internet.
Inflexible Irene
Irene wants immediate action, does not want long queues and when she is in for a check-up she does not want to stay long. Sometimes, she looks for a diagnosis online and will do self-medication, rather than be in a clinic. Even though there are online options she would rather be in a pharmacy buying her meds.
Good Doctor Shawn
He can navigate with technology and with consultation being online helped him with his task, but he rather wants to do face-to-face consultation for a holistic approach to diagnosing the patient. He wants to do pro bono consults also for less fortunate patients and wishes that the app can be flexible enough to waive the patient’s payment to him.
Our Most Newsworthy Takeaways
We were wrong about:
Assumptions on convenience with having consultation online, 5 out of 8 interviewees prefer only to visit check-ups if in need of prescriptions and unless the sickness is severe and compelling.
As also mentioned in our research statement, this platform will be helpful to patients when buying medicine online. Surprisingly, ALL of the respondents are more comfortable purchasing meds in a pharmacy.
We were right about:
Our research objective appears to be on the right track. Specified by 2 out of 3 doctors, opt for a medium that can offer digital check-up services that allow patients to submit medical forms before their scheduled appointment.
Wherein, one of Medi-CALLs’ attributes is to provide physicians the ability to check a wider range of clinical information, and can easily access and pull up patients’ medical records/history.
Our major eye-opener:
Online Medical consultations are acceptable but it implies that the doctors we interviewed opt to have face-to-face consultations for a more holistic approach.
Upon the completion of our interview, much to our surprise is that ALL interviewees prefer to purchase medicine not online but in a physical pharmacy.
Design Recommendation
1. Real-time schedule setup
Refining the real-time system which was seen as a much-needed amendatory supplement to the Medi-CALL platform:
(1) confirming the physicians’ availability and (2) reflecting the corrected and updated schedules on the platform for booking canceled appointments that may solve the problem of hassles in queueing.
2. Enhancement of Data Security
Reinforce and enhance good security privacy. Further, improve the quality of information confidentiality thru these simple steps below:
a. Regular security software updates
b. Require strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication for all users.
c. Disable data tracking and use encryption
3. Hide Physicians Status
We will have options for doctors to hide their availability status, control the numbers of their patients, and for them to focus on their regular patients accordingly.
This way, our physicians will have more flexibility regarding their system and schedule and also prevent having a high cancellation rate.
STUDY RESOURCES
…here’s the snapshot of what we have done during the entire research.
As mentioned we used notion for organizing materials and notes. The next image is the interview guide and the last would be our synthesis resource — affinity diagram using Figjam.
This is the end of our case Study for the UX Research part…
