Home Infusion digital Instruction (HIDI)
A website specifically for home infusion therapy treatment with both patients AND pharmacists in mind. Features like tutorial-viewing, pharmacist contacts, and daily reminders are meant to ease the confusing process of home infusion for patients, while the companion site for pharmacists will be used to track and update patient treatment.
UX Researcher
Interaction Designer
Requirement Engineer
Backend Developer
Sabrina Lee
Abdul Osman
Christine Trinh
Tianxiong (Jax) Wu
Yihang (Brenda) Yang
Chenyuan (Cheney) Zhang
Oct. 2020 - April. 2021
(7 months)
Infusion therapy treats infections through self administered medication injections. These require patients to use tools such as a syringe, pump, and picc line which is a long, thin, soft tube that is inserted into a vein.
Infusion therapy is usually done at home and patients are expected to use these tools they likely have never used before. Anyone of any age can receive infusion therapy, but 60 year or older patients are the most common.
For the most part, it’s the ‘home’ aspect. The purpose of these infusions is to have patients self-administer once discharged from the hospital; however, not all patients are medically trained to do the infusions.
Additionally, instructions, which can come from a variety of sources like outdated prints or verbal notes from nurses and pharmacists themselves, are conflicting and inconsistent.
Sometimes patients have to be readmitted to the hospital because they don’t know how to properly do the infusions.
The following are some example of printed infusion instructions:
In order to better understand the needs of both patients and pharmacists, with the help of our sponsors, we had the chance to interview five pharmacists and five patients.
For patients, there are a lot of obstacles need to overcome. For example:
1. When the medication was coming
2. Who was bringing the medication
3. When were they starting the procedure
4. Whether they'd have a nurse to help
5. "Once the medication leaves office, they do not care; they just provide medication and leave the
situation as is."
Interviewees mentioned that it was frustrating and overwhelming to get a bag full of things that you
have never seen before.
There are NO resources to know whether what you were doing was correct because the
instructions are
usually not detailed/comprehensive enough - lacking details like how fast to give the
medication, the correct preparation with
medication before you even inject it (e.g. break it and put it in the back and shake it before putting
it into the saline solution, drip it for a
certain amount of time), etc.
Moreover, sometimes there were conflicting instructions between what they were given vs. told.
Our interviewees mentioned that at the hospital, the infusions were
every 10 hours but after the patient been discharged to home, it changed to every 12 hours without
telling a reason.
Although home infusion can be wearisome, patients usually prefer to stay home. However, when the patients leave the hospital, it is hard to get in touch again. Sometimes, the package even does not include contacts or pharmacy information.
We had learned a lot from pharmacists, especially the information regarding HIPPA; for example, they need patients to sign the consent form before texting. Some of the regulations even affected our software design decisions.
According to pharmacists, most people do not know about home infusions until they are actually prescribed, so it may not be that common in the first place. Home infusions are usually the last thing that they resort to when infections are that bad.
One of the pharmacists we interviewed mentioned that she worked with the technician team so that each team has a designated pharmacist and technician to work with specific patients. Although they teach patients how to do it and there are some introduction printouts of infusion therapy on their website, learning how to infuse the medications on their own is still quite tricky.
After we finished the interviews, I learned that it is easy to make assumptions about what users want, rather than what they really need. We further transcribed the interviews to make sure the requirements cover up their pain points and desires.
1. Digitizing existing documentation of post-care instructional infusion papers
2. Alarm functionality for patients who wish to be notified about medication times
3. Helpful resources to assist patients such as direct connection sources to the pharmacy providing
medication
4. Post-care patients should be able to easily access their patient-specific instructions through the web
platform
1. Ability to edit, update or make notes on the instructions
2. Ability to edit, update on the alarms
You can access the full requirement document here.
We sketched out our ideas and brainstormed together. The sketches also helped us finalize our Generalized Transition Network and how we would like our users to interact with the app.
Based on our ideation, we created interactive prototype on Figma and conducted usability with some
interviewers again.
We received valuable feedback, such as some vocabulary we were using was not accurate, button placement was
not conspicuous, etc.
We made changes and finished the High-Fidelity mockup based on their feedbacks accordingly.
I enjoyed working with my team, sponsors, and instructors for the past six months. I am indebted that I had this opportunity to reach out and work with professionals in the industry.
Through this project, the biggest takeaway is that the business goal is equally important as the design goal. We, as a designer, want to create a beautiful and elegant product. However, we need to also keep in mind that our design must deliver to the end-users.
Many thanks to my teammates, sponsors, and instructors for guiding us throughout the process; also my friends who taught me the basic knowledge of backend programming. Although the pandemic caused this project to be extra challenging, and we did not have a chance to meet in person, I still appreciate all the bits of help and memories from everyone.
