Experience Design In Health Care: A New Imperative

Leonard Kish | HL7 Standards | September 25, 2012

Patient engagement is a potent therapeutic, but how is engagement related to a core tenet of healthcare’s Triple Aim: Patient experience? For that, let’s take a quick look at user experience (UX) design in software.

We’ve all had the experience of getting somewhere in an app or a piece of software and saying, “Now what? Where is that button I know I need to press to get to the place in the system I need to do what I need to do?” That in a nutshell, is an example of the common bad user experience. At the moment the tool is not obvious and not intuitive and without an immediate answer, we will maybe call a friend for an answer, quit using the tool, bang on the keyboard, move on to something else, or all the above. To illustrate: 26% of iOS apps are opened just once and then discarded.

According to EffectiveUI, 70% of software projects fail (probably not far off the rate of patients adhering to their plan of care). The failure comes down to acceptance and adoption. People don’t use the tool because it doesn’t do what they want (outcomes), it costs too much (price), or the user experience is confusing (experience). Software has been working to deliver it’s own triple aim for a long time and out of that has grown the discipline of user experience design...