Jan - May 2015

Carebook is a mobile app for hospital patients and families to easily manage and prepare for medical appointments. As today's healthcare system strives toward delivering high-quality patient care while reducing spending costs, it's becoming increasingly important for healthcare professionals to engage with patients in meaningful ways. One way to do so is to give them access to medical data that's useful and easy to understand.

Carebook gives patients the information they need to feel aware and prepared going into procedures and treatments. Unlike digital patient portal services or other patient mobile apps, Carebook leverages outside data to complement one's personal medial information and is designed with both patients and their loved ones in mind. By sharing medical data in a way that is approachable and human, Carebook is the foundation for a growing platform that empowers people to become advocates of their own health.

Carebook was my graduate thesis project at SVA. You can read about my process and journey in depth here.

A discussion with my thesis instructor and my classmates on the process behind it all.

Prototypes of the onboarding flow (left) and full experience (right)

The start of a long, winding journey

Each student in their final year of the SVA IxD program gets to pursue a thesis project in a field of their choosing. It is meant to be a pointed exploration of interaction design’s role and potential in the world. Given personal experiences, I was certain I wanted to focus on healthcare, but I had no little idea what part of healthcare I wanted to study or what to build.

With limited direct access to hospitals and knowledge in the processes in how doctors, nurses and administrators work, I started off by conducting user interviews with doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, nurse navigators, patients, researchers, and engineers in the space to better understand the healthcare space. With every chat, I gleaned overwhelming amounts of new information from these and to parse through it, I would draw out the flows they told me about and do post-it mappings to better uncover underlying themes.

Ideas that didn’t make the cut

Once I got a better sense of the healthcare system and its pain points, I started ideating. From the patient perspective, a few problems resonated with me. Over the course of a day, doctors and visitors come and go frequently and unexpectedly - each with their own bit of knowledge to share about the patient’s health. It’s hard to keep track of it all. I explored making a Patient Passbook, a family-centric booklet that is located at the patient’s bedside and allows doctors, nurses, loved ones and patients to collectively document the patient’s general well-being, activities or status throughout the entire care cycle.

My classmates were kind enough to run through a role-playing exercise with me to test out how it might work.

Another area I looked at was the physical design of hospitals. One thing I learned while talking to RNs and doctors was just how much knowledge and information about their patients they stored in their mind. When I asked how they keep track of it all, they say they rely on notebooks and patient records. Catching up quickly on those notes before they meet with a patient right before is something they do to jog their memory. So I was curious: could we solve this with a beacon-enabled and context-aware communication system for doctors and nurses?

Snapshots from the design phase

Once I got crisp on the problem to solve and my approach, I scoped and started laying out the app on paper.

Finally, I started iterating on the branding for Carebook.