Mobile Health for Teens & Caregivers

Challenge

With over a hundred apps that are out there to help support the mobile health initiatives, the mobile core committee sought a holistic systems strategy for their mobile health vision for families and patients that are living with a chronic disease. The hospital's mobile core committee seeks to understand chronic disease patients, and their caregivers' journey with a focus on identifying gaps specific to each user segment and opportunities for new mobile health solutions.

The Approach

Over a period of 3 months we:

• Conducted exploratory research to gather insights into the best ways to engage teens and their caregivers during the therapy journey
• Completed one-on-one interactive co-design sessions with patients and their caregivers
• Mapped current experiences
• Explored innovative possibilities and ideal futures
• Found patterns across patients with different diseases (Type 1 Diabetes, Cystic Fibrosis, ADHD and Epilepsy)

Key Deliverables

Created a comprehensive Patient Life and Transition Journey map showing the progression from diagnosis through building long-term perspective and transition to independence. The journey map documented how caregivers help their teens build responsibility, moving from 100% caregiver involvement at diagnosis to ideally 50% teen responsibility in later phases.

Impact

• The patient experience archetype journey map that had their needs, key moments and caregiver emotions for three different patient segments age 14 to 20 was used for prioritizing the initiative to be funded for the next year
• Insights and opportunities uncovered from this work are being used to position the Hospital as a thought leader in Mobile Health via peer-review publications
• The integrated mobile health ecosystem has become foundational for the mobile core committee to make future strategic decisions