CareX - Alexa App
A voice bot designed for cardiac patient to monitor their health by simply saying "Hey Alexa- Open CareX!"
OVERVIEW
Athena Health hosted the MDP Hackathon Watertown 2017 where people from any domain were welcomed and had 49 hours to build a solution that would disrupt the healthcare status quo.
My team and I chose to develop an interactive application to help doctors monitor the health and diet of cardiac patients post-discharge. The final result was an Alexa App that would interact with patient and guide them about their diet and medicine.
DURATION
49 hrs of Hackathon
MY ROLE
As a UX Designer, I was responsible for conducting user research comprising user interviews, quick survey, domain research, designing user flow and assisting in creating script.
TEAM
Two SDs, DevOps Engineer & Two UX Designers
First step, understanding the user problems
QUICK INTERVIEW
I kept the initial research direct, quick, and at no cost and led the development of a short interview script. Participants were recruited from the other Hackathon teams and some doctors and nurses at the hackathon. This initial research helped us to nail down our focal point for designing the Alexa app.
SECONDARY DOMAIN RESEARCH
After the primary research, it was time for us to dig deep and figure out the root cause and analyze the pain points for both doctors and patients.
Due to the time constraint, we focused specifically on cardiac patients and how we can help reducing the readmission rate for such patient which would in return help hospitals in cutting down the readmission penalty costs. I consulted articles on how we can reduce the heart failure readmission rate and evidence-based practices that can help in monitoring patient’s health for avoiding readmission to hospitals. I advocated for incorporating this into the language used by our skill.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
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2,573 Hospital face readmission penalty in 2017
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3% regual reimbursement were withheld due to readmission rate rising in chronic heart diease
CONTEXT SCENARIO
A majority of doctors and nurses reported that they would use a mobile application or an interactive device post-discharge for the patient to monitor their weight and diet on a regular basis to avoid readmission rate. Taking proper medication on right time was reported as well.
Designing User Flows
We started with researching the ways patient might ask a voice-bot for information, then worked with the developers to make sure our app would respond in a clear, concise and natural way.
NATURAL LANGUAGE
Through brainstorming and user testing, I identified the possible phrases patient might naturally use to ask CareX for information. I created several utterances that CareX would respond to that were congruent with the natural language and handed them off to our developers.
FUNCTIONING OF CAREX
Alexa Skillset developed in the amazon console is linked by the code of assumed output of the user through RESTful API. The Alexa skill set is also connected to Athena Health API to fetch the actual data of the patients in regards to medicine and diet. We also connected CareX with Twilio API which allowed the patient to receive text message confirmation of appointment made with their doctor and also provides reminder to the patient about their appointment.
END RESULT
CareX won the 1st prize and the best design prize by Mad*Pow!
