Coping with Complexityin Health Care

Enabling Sense-making through Great UX

medullan

DI G I TA L . H E A LT H. I NNOVAT I ON . F OR BE TT E R L I V E S .

#AskMedullan

Rebecca LordDirector, UX

Tim MerrillSr. Manager, UX

Rob GiffordSr. Associate,

UX

Who Are We?

Innovation forbetter lives

Improve the healthcare experience by designing and developing solutions which engage healthcare consumers and facilitate business transformation

Our mission:

ProductStrategy

UX/UI Design& Testing

Technology Implementation

What Do We Do?

We design solutions that engageusers across the healthcare spectrum through:

Healthcare

Healthcare is huge.

17%of all money made in U.S.comes from healthcare

Complexity in Healthcare

It effects us at every point of our lives..

Financially Well-being

Complexity in Healthcare

Trends converging

Advancementsin Science

PolicyNew

Technology

Users

Highlyregulated

Legacysystems

It’s confusing.

Insurance coveragePatient outcomes

Care management

Clinical research

WellnessManaging chronic conditions

UX can help people feel empowered

UX+ =Empathy Systems thinking Psychology

Information design

Let’s dig into a few ways UX can solve health care complexity:

Making decisions about health coverage

Making sense of medical information

Taking advantage of the sea of health data

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And how?

Experience models and frameworks

Familiar design patterns

Cognitive computing

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Complex Health Coverage Decisions

Rob Gifford

Meet Amy…

26 years old

She just finished her Master of Social Work Degree

Landed a job at a local non-profit

First full-time job with benefits

Well, sort of…

Rather than offering traditional benefits, Amy’s employer is offeringhealth coverage through a Health Insurance Exchange

Health insurance exchanges are marketplaces for health plans.

Millions of employees are now receiving coverage through public and private exchange.

Health exchanges explained

That’s great for employees, right?

Employers love exchanges because they make costs predictableand provide plenty of options for employees.

Health exchanges explained

More choices often lead to more anxiety & regret and lower satisfaction.

The Paradox of Choice

Unlike porridge and jam,health insurance is complex.

Amy’s Paradox

She’s being tasked to pick the option that will lead to the right level of coverage for her.

More options = more confusion & potential regret

Traditional decision theory says the most accurate decisions are made using a weighted-additive approach

How do does Amy decide?

Plans differ on a variety of attributes

• Co-pay• Deductibles• Co-insurance• Out-of-pocket max• Amount of providers • In-network vs. out-of-

network costs

Insurance plans are complicated

This is Amy’s first job with benefits

Things are starting to get complicated…

Which attributes are important?

There is a lot of uncertainty.

Currently, Amy is not in the happy quadrant.

How UX can help

How do we move her?

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Simplicity of choice

Decision Complexity

Educate her about which attributes of insurance plans are most important and remove irrelevant data

Design information so that important plan attributes of a decision areprominently displayed

How UX can help

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How UX can help

Ask Amy about her health care needs in plain language and analyze our plans for her.

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Using our knowledge of her, we can narrow down plans to a few meaningful options framed in a logical order.

How UX can help

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We can format plan information to facilitate clear comparison between plan attributes that matter most

How UX can help

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By employing these techniques, we simplified Amy’s choice and empower her with a better understanding of her options. A

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Simplicity of choice

Decision Complexity

How UX can help

A High Deductible Plan with an Health Savings Account

Why? She's relatively young and has few health conditions. It’s the most affordable option while also insuring she was prepared in case anything did happen.

What did Amy decide?

Amy can have confidence in her choice.She also has a few extra dollars each month

to pay for her vacation (she’ll need it).

Making Sense ofMedical Information

Rebecca Lord

Complex medical information

surrounds us

Making sense of it is challenging, yet people need to make important decisions, potentially life changing decisions, based on this information

And it’s not getting any

simpler

Full genome sequencing is becoming readily available and more popular

It provides a map of your unique makeup and finds variations that may cause disease or affect your risk for disease

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Our Challenge in UX…

Make complex medical information understandable, meaningful, and actionable.

Meet Jack…

Works for a software company in business development

Married with two kids

Loves running and getting outside

Generally healthy guy

Jack decided to have his full genome sequenced two years ago. Why?

Know thyself. He wanted a better understanding of who he was from a health perspective.

“Is there something I can be doing to take better care of myself that I’m not aware of?”

Also, geeky curiosity. Jack has a masters in chemistry and is passionate about the trends in genomic diagnostics.

Jack was excited when his results came in…

Particularly since he could view them on his iPad!

But…

When he logged in, Jack was left feeling confused and frustrated.

Primary screens don’t support confident exploration

Interactive visualizations too complicated to comprehend

Libraries of educational material too technical to understand

No tools to facilitate connection and collaboration

Despite the bad UX…

Jack learned a few things.

Seriously, after many hours of exploring his genome, Jack learned:

He has a variant on SCN5A gene which is associated with Romano-Ward syndrome.

A common symptom is light-headedness during intense exercise.

This explains why:

Jack passed out a mile from the finish line at the Boston Marathon a few years ago.

This surprising information gaveJack a sense of relief and motivated him to change…

He only competes in shorter road races — half-marathons are just fine!

And always runs with friends, just in case.

Remember, Jack is special…

He’s got a masters in chemistry

He’s familiar with and passionate about genomics

He’s already pretty healthy

We’re not all chemists and for many people, seeing their genomic results will be emotionally charged.How can we make this a better experience?

We’ve already got the tools

Familiar design patterns and principles can transform the experience of consuming complex medical information

Design for real people,

not scientists

Tool tipsAuto-suggestSorting & filtering

Support confident exploration and

learning

SearchFaceted navigationPersonalized spotlighting

Create a sense of community and

support

ForumsDirect & group messagingIntroductions & connectionsDonation tools

Enable continued learning and collaboration

Bookmarks Notebooks/boardsSocial sharing

Using familiar design patterns and principles can transform

the experience of consuming

complex medical information.

Cognitive ComputingActionable Insights

from a Sea of Medical Data

Tim Merrill

Promote healthy behaviors

Improve patient outcomes

Improve quality of care

Reduce costs

Reduce re-admissions

Challenging Themes in Healthcare

Help people makebetter decisions

Staggering amount of data

at our fingertips

How do we help people make sense?

Traditional Analytics?

The Dawn of Cognitive Computing

Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought

processes in a computerized model.

Deep data mining

Unstructured data processing, including natural language and images

Awareness of context

What does that mean?

Sounds awesome. And yet entirely impractical

for my project.

Nope.

‹#›page© Medullan Inc.

What can Watson do now?

Understand the relationship between speech patterns and known personality traits

Explore tradeoffs when faced with multiple dimensions of important data

Provide a natural language question and answer service

What can Watson do for healthcare?

Radiology andCardiology:

Medical Sieve

CaféWell:Watson helps

patients get health and

wellness information

Watson helps doctors diagnose and treat cancer patients

Watsonvs.

Cancer

Now it’s your turn.

Cognitive computingis a powerful tool

for your UX toolbelt.

Watson’s Available Services (APIs)

ConceptExpansion

PersonalityInsights

ConceptInsights

MessageResonance

RelationshipExtraction

TradeoffAnalytics

VisualizationRendering

Question andAnswer

VisualRecognition

Speech toText

Text toSpeech

LanguageIdentification

MachineTranslation

Personality InsightsDemo

• Play: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud

• Find a good problem to solve

• Gather the right data sources

• Train it on the data - build a “corpus”

• Design the interface

• Plan for feedback loop

How do I use it?

Wrap up

Great UX solves real problems in health care:

Making decisions about health coverage

Making sense of medical information

Taking advantage of the sea of health data

1

2

3

And how?

Experience models and frameworks

Familiar design patterns

Cognitive computing

1

2

3

Thank you

#AskMedullan

• Watson APIs: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

• Healthcare questions demo (https://watsonhealthqa.mybluemix.net/)

• Gallery: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/gallery.html

• Open Source Github Resources: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud

• http://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/details/

Resources