User-Centered Design Groups to Engage Patients and Caregivers with a Personalized Health Information Technology Tool.
Health information technology (IT) has opened exciting avenues for capturing, delivering and sharing data, and offers the potential to develop cost-effective, patient-focused applications. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of health IT applications such as outpatient portals. Rigorous evaluation is fundamental to ensure effectiveness and sustainability, as resistance to more widespread adoption of outpatient portals may be due to lack of user friendliness. Health IT applications that integrate with the existing electronic health record and present information in a condensed, user-friendly format could improve coordination of care and communication. Importantly, these applications should be developed systematically with appropriate methodological design and testing to ensure usefulness, adoption, and sustainability. Based on our prior work that identified numerous information needs and challenges of HCT, we developed an experimental prototype of a health IT tool, the BMT Roadmap. Our goal was to develop a tool that could be used in the real-world, daily practice of HCT patients and caregivers (users) in the inpatient setting. Herein, we examined the views, needs, and wants of users in the design and development process of the BMT Roadmap through user-centered Design Groups. Three important themes emerged: 1) perception of core features as beneficial (views), 2) alerting the design team to potential issues with the user interface (needs); and 3) providing a deeper understanding of the user experience in terms of wider psychosocial requirements (wants). These findings resulted in changes that led to an improved, functional BMT Roadmap product, which will be tested as an intervention in the pediatric HCT population in the fall of 2015 (ClinicalTrials.govNCT02409121).
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Molly
M
Maher
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Elizabeth
E
Kaziunas
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Mark
M
Ackerman
Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Holly
H
Derry
Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Rachel
R
Forringer
Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Kristen
K
Miller
Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Dennis
D
O'Reilly
Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Larry C
LC
An
Department of Internal Medicine, Hematology/Oncology Division and Molecular Medicine and Genetics Division, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Biointerfaces Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Comprehensive Cancer Center, Bioinformatics Core, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Muneesh
M
Tewari
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Comprehensive Cancer Center, Bioinformatics Core, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
David A
DA
Hanauer
Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Electronic address: sungchoi@med.umich.edu.
Sung Won
SW
Choi
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D017028:Caregivers; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000592:standards*; D008875:Middle Aged; D057285:Precision Medicine / Q000592:standards*
Caregiver; Design group; Engagement; Health IT; Hematopoietic cell transplantation; Pediatric; User-centered design