Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
An app to connect PAH patients with their healthcare team
Creating more transparency between patients and HCPs
Through interviews with patients and healthcare professionals, we conceptualized an app experience to foster better connections.
Challenge
People living with PAH often visit their clinician regularly to assess symptoms. With COVID-19 preventing in-person visits at the time, there were fewer clinical visits and therefore the need for a solution to connect patients and HCPs.
Approach
With the goal of creating a digital tool that could help patients connect with their team of clinicians, we applied design thinking methods and processes to conceptualize an interface to encourage more transparency between patients and HCPs.
Result
Enabling PAH patients to share logged informations with their healthcare team from a remote setting, CareConnect was designed for the user to log information. By sharing the results virtually, any changes in the patient’s status can be seen by the HCP.
With CareConnect, patients are able to keep their symptom log in the app, as well as dynamically syncing the data to their healthcare professional’s interface.
Result
An HCP platform and patient companion app built to connect people.
Made up of two components, an HCP platform connected with a patient-facing mobile app that captured key information remotely, CareConnect would enable the patient’s HCP to act from a distance. The app was developed to know what to capture and could lean on an objective method to formulate a patient´s status. Part of the conceptualized purpose of the app was for it to collect data points from a variety of connected devices, and with a GPS-based tracking test, the disease specific 6-minute walk test could be done remotely. We knew that most patients already kept a physical notebook where they logged a symptom diary to remember important information and keep track of any trends in their symptoms when visiting their clinician. Empowered with CareConnect, they could keep this information in the app with the bonus of dynamically syncing the data to the HCP interface. By connecting the patient’s inputted data with the HCP interface, CareConnect had the ability to improve information sharing between the patient and HCP. The product idea was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so beyond the increased transparency, patients were able to perform tasks and measurements at home.
Key features
Tracking
The app needed to track 4 metrics at separate intervals, each with different techniques. These included blood pressure, 6-minute walk test, blood work, and the WHO functional class to calculate a score. Since they needed to fit into an everyday schedule the key design criteria was an efficient flow that was easy to use.
Insights
A valuable feature for both patients and HCPs would be the ability to see trends in data points captured over time. For HCPs this feature would serve as a way of communicating needed changes in treatment to patients, while patients also felt more empowered by knowing their history.
Walk test
The 6 Minute Walk Test feature logs the test results using the phones GPS and instructs users during the test with supporting text, large illustrations and animations. Additionally, the feature has an easy-to-understand interface with a large clock timer ticking down to easily see your progress. When the test is over, the user can either submit their data to their HCP or start over.
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