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Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Improving health literacy for recently diagnosed, paediatric, Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients
By infusing relevant data that is available about him or her, such as personal details, clinical results, notes during consultations, performed surgeries, experiences of prescribed treatment, experienced symptoms prior to treatment etc. Pling customises parts of the health literacy to a patient’s disease experience.
Patients can be addressed on a more personal note, besides all the child friendly health literacy Pling provides for the user. It is expected that addressing patients in the beginning of every topic on a personal note builds up a sense of trust and empathy.
After retrieving a patient’s EHR, the child goes through a short onboarding program. This is where Pling greets the child in a friendly matter, asks him or her to choose a character and explains the benefits of the four chapters Pling has.
It tells the child, in a conclusive way that they recently have been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease (variable added by care giver) after experiencing certain symptoms (variable added by care giver) and that they have been put on a treatment (variable added by care giver) which will help them to prevent previously experienced symptoms from reoccurring.
The quick onboarding trajectory mainly functions as an executive summary for the child, where the negative disease experiences prior to their diagnosis are converted into hope.
After retrieving a patient's EHR and a short onboarding process, the user will end up in the main menu, where he or she can choose between the four different educational chapters;
What the …?, Just beat it!, You are not alone and Who’s the doc?. The main menu will also show the user how many badges are left to achieve, if they have received new notifications from other patients and allows the child to change settings.
One of the core chapters of Pling regards understanding the implications of a diagnosed chronic disease, in this case Crohn’s Disease, on your overall wellbeing. The name of this chapter ‘What the …?’ is chosen because lots of children do not understand why this disease is targeting them and might feel lost in understanding the implications of it.
In a way, the title represents their current state of mind and would therefore increase user engagement.
Parents and children may be clueless or feel desperate in combatting this disease. This chapter aims to build treatment awareness, and addresses the issue of complex medical language and impact of medications.
Through gamification, it's expected a child will use this tool longer anmore frequently. There is a strong focus on visual assets and compelling copy.
Providing care, getting patients in remission and making sure they adhere to their treatment is often top priority of a healthcare team. In order to succeed, everyone in the healthcare team has a specific role. For a child it can be difficult to understand who to reach out to with certain questions.
These two chapters provide information about everyone involved in the healthcare team, ranging from the paediatrician, IBD-nurse, pharmacist, social worker, but also parents, friends and schoolteachers, footbaltrainers etc.
A 1:30-minute video was created to lure the interest of potential investors. A mix of of Adobe Illustrator, Character Animator, After Effects and Premiere was used to put it together.
Encountering long pieces of text can be quite overwhelming for the young ones, as they will know it take quite some time to read it. Reading books is not what an average child likes to do, as it requires focus and can get easily distracted. Pling breaks down information in categories, subjects, topics and blocks in order to not overwhelm the child with information.
A ten-year old child has a different intellectual capability than a nineteen-year old adult and can therefore experience difficulties when it comes to understanding complex medical information. As paediatric IBD occurs less frequent than adult IBD, the majority of information a person can find online targets the adult population.
Children books are successfull as their balance between language and semiotics is appropriate. Their extensive use of semiotics is carefully chosen for the target group as it gets often the meaning better across than text.
Pling uses a library of illustrations and animations that provides information about the topic the child needs to be educated about. These illustrations and animations can tell a story about medications often better than language can and therefore justifies its extensive use.
The team at Shire that focusses on developing and marketing a new biologic for adult IBD patients exists of biologists, technical chemists, physicians, marketeers, patient service leads, registered nurses and business managers. Besides working with Shire’s internal cross-disciplinary team, resources outside Shire were used to find unmet needs in paediatric IBD care, such as behavioural psychologists, IBD nurses, paediatricians and adult gastroenterologists.
One of the major activitities that was done during the research phase was the facilitation of a workshop at one of Shire’s strategic offices in Zug, Switzerland. Mid-February I hosted a one-day workshop in the Shire’s Zug office where five Shire employees joined. Their diverse experience, with backgrounds ranging from biologists, technical chemists, marketeers, patient service leads and medicine, allowed me to identify opportunities across a broad spectrum.
The main goal of cultural probing is to identify unmet needs in specific contexts, which in this case is paediatric IBD care. Parents and children were asked to fill in questions, take photos, solve scenarios and complete creative exercises. The cultural probe offered a possibility for the parent and child to express wishes and exchange ideas, besides sharing the problems they are facing on a daily base.
I set myself the goal to include as many stakeholders as possible in this project, continuously, to learn from and validate research findings, ideate and validate solutions with them. One of the ways I tried to reach out to patients, parents, professionals and others who have an interest, was by writing articles for ImproveCareNow and the European Federation of Crohn’s and Colitis Associations (EFCCA)
As children grow up, their behaviour, intellectual capabilities, level of expected independence and environment change accordingly. It is known that IBD is a highly individualised disease and therefore some patients experience more frequent and severe symptoms than others.
Research shows there is no lack of access to general IBD information for a patient or parent, however, access to medical records is not a given to all patients and parents. In order to understand how the disease has affected a patient in the past, how IBD is currently affecting the patient and how it might affect the patient in the future, it is expected that providing patient-tailored information, additional to the team-based consultations with the paediatric care team, about their condition increases knowledge and therefore self-reliance.
As education is the first step in the transition program, which promotes independence and self-reliance, and increases patient engagement, it is fundamentally important to stimulate patients and parents to educate themselves.
Based on market research, reviewed literature and expert interviews, it can be concluded there is a need to self-educate patients outside the hospital.
There is a conflict, where education is needed but sometimes hard to achieve. The goal is to create a solution that allows patients to get the information they need in an easier and more engaging way, using improved storytelling and with a final goal of achieving a state of self-reliance prior to moving to adult care.
The design framework can be seen on the image below, where the main question is described on the left and the three subquestions directly on the right side of it. The six colourfull blocks next to the subquestions are design principles, whose are chosen based on the the idea validation and reviewed literature.
The goal of creating a design framework was to critically evaluate the essence of the main question. Crafting a design framework also encourages to extend creative capabilities, as a subquestion can trigger additional thoughts. Ideating and looking in depth into the market and its users resulted in two leading design considerations.