Helping Patients Manage Chronic Kidney Disease
Client: Dr Reddys
Domain: Healthcare, Pharmaceutical
Duration: 4 Months
Tools: Ethnographic Research, User Experience Design, Business Design, Service Design, Interaction Design, Rapid Prototyping.
Chronic kidney disease (CKD), also known as chronic renal disease, is a condition where a patient gradually (over several years) loses her kidney function. In the earlier stages of the disease, treatment focuses on slowing the progression of the disease before it gets to a stage where regular dialysis or a kidney transplant becomes necessary. We were brought in to help understand patient behavior and design a technology solution to help patients manage the disease and to make it easier for them to adhere to their prescribed regimen.
IN A NUTSHELL The Problem
The Approach
The Result
We were asked to design and help develop a mobile application to help patients and their caregivers better manage CKD.
We started by conducting deep ethnographic research and then followed an iterative process of rapid prototype development and user testing to quickly develop and refine the overall design.
The app has been tested across geographies with a select number of doctors and will be released to a broader audience over the next few months. The initial feedback has been extremely positive both from doctors as well as patients.
THE OPPORTUNITY Chronic Kidney Disease is widespread with some estimates indicating that over 7M people in India suer from it. The conditions worsens over time but with proper care, it can be managed.
Our client, one of the top three pharmaceutical companies in India, identified a potential opportunity to develop an app to help chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients manage the disease. Through their experiences and interactions with physicians over several years, they developed a hypothesis of the required core components and functionality of the app. The firm engaged us to validate its key findings, combine those with any other insights we uncover through our own research and then to design the app.
THE PROCESS
We started by speaking with nephrologists and subject matter experts from the industry, and then transitioned to focus on patients and caregivers. These were emotionally charged conversations. The eect of the illness on the patients as well as the family was profound. Few were in tears while talking about their state of mind. Some were strong but we could still feel how their lives and the lives of others around them had changed due to
the illness. We looked at how they were managing the therapy with regard to food and medication and at what impact the illness had on other family members and their responsibilities to help the patient take care of himself / herself.
After the initial research phase and armed with a deep understanding of the users’ needs, desires, and aspirations, we built a preliminary set of wireframes. The wireframes were quickly turned into an Android app with hardcoded data. We were able to take this prototype to patients and caregivers and let them play around with it in a guided manner. As they went through the app, they would voice their opinion. We also showed the app to the doctors and involved them in defining some of the features. We used these inputs from caregivers, patients and doctors to iterate the design. We completed multiple cycles of this approach to prototyping. With each successive cycle, we refined the design.
Once we were comfortable with the broad feature set, we started working on detailed visual design of the app. In parallel we also started the back-end work of developing the server side components. During this phase, we did several rounds of usability and visual design reviews and integrated the feedback to ensure quality and ease of use.
The medical content for the app was developed by a content development team. The food related content such as recipes were developed in collaboration with a celebrity chef, a doctor and a nutritionist. We wanted to add the additional aspect of a celebrity chef for the patients to feel good about what they were eating and the choices they were being given.
THE RESULT The client is now piloting the app with a small group of physicians and the early results look extremely encouraging. Pre-pilot, the app has received great feedback from doctors and nutritionists allover the country.