Designing, building & deploying a streamline system that can assess patient's 10 year risk of osteoporotic fracture whilst they waited to see a practitioner in a GP's surgery.
Designing, building & deploying a streamline system that can assess patient's 10 year risk of osteoporotic fracture whilst they waited to see a practitioner in a GP's surgery.
Rareloop were approached to create an application that could help GP's better identify patients who were at risk of suffering an osteoporotic bone fracture. The patients would answer a series of questions about various known risk factors (e.g. medical history, medication) and based on their answers a risk percentage would be given of suffering from a fracture in the next ten years. Other criteria such as the patients BMI would also need to be calculated to get a more accurate risk assessment.
The app was deployed on iPads fixed to the wall in waiting rooms of several doctor's surgeries in and around London. The application was designed to be used by patients unassisted and we leveraged our usability experience to ensure that interactions were tailored to users of varying technical ability. Providing sufficient on screen help was crucial to the projects success and underpinned our user-experience engineering.
Simplicity and speed were two primary design motivations
To enable multiple iPads across several London based surgeries to all feed into a single repository for the clients research Rareloop developed a centralised cloud based solution to collate anonimised responses. This ensured that the National Osteoporosis Society could perform research and monitor risk factor trends.
Simplicity and speed were two primary design motivations. The interface and input mechanisms had to be intuitive & quick to use even if the data required for research was complex, normally requiring the assistance of a trained health care professional.
Connectivity within the surgeries was known to be unpredictable, many didn't have a broadband connection and instead utilised the 3G connection on the iPad. To combat the poor connection Rareloop implemented a caching mechanism so that all submissions were stored locally onto the device; when a suitable connection could be made they were uploaded to the cloud server. This process happened 'in the background' and had no impact on the end users, it did however greatly improve the accuracy and completeness of the data collected for the clients research work.
Printers were installed in each of the GP's surgeries so that patients who were identified as being at risk of a fracture could print out a risk assessment and take it with them to their consultation. Utilising the built in AirPrint support of both the iPad and HP Photosmart printer Rareloop were able to provide this functionality in a seamless wireless manner.
Usability design and providing sufficient on screen help was crucial to the projects success.
As a number of the surgeries didn't have access to broadband the iPads had to be configured to work on both the inbuilt 3G connection, along with a local ad hoc WiFi network to enable the printing. Rareloop were able to offer ongoing support in this regard to each of the GP's practices.
In order to maintain an intuitive user experience, new touch optimised input interfaces had to be created. One of the inputs that proved most important was a graphical slider to enable height and weight input. Instead of requiring multiple user inputs to capture the different components of height and weight along with additional controls to toggle between metric and imperial measurements, Rareloop were able to produce an input that required just a single interaction.
The application took the form a multi-page survey, with questions being grouped by relevance. When a page was complete the user needed to touch the 'next' button to progress to the next set of questions. To help guide users through the process Rareloop added an animated arrow to draw attention to the next button once they had completed a given page. Automatic page progression was decided against to allow users to easily make changes to any given answer and to ensure that they always felt in control of the experience.
Animation was also used subtly elsewhere in the design to give the user the sense of movement through the survey. When changing from page to page, a fluid sliding transition was used to re-inforce the sense of progression and to show that the users actions were having a tangible effect on the process.
In addition to collecting data, for the clients research goals, an important deliverable was to output the patients risk of fracture in a way that was meaningful & easily understood. Utilising the FRAX model, a standard for this type of risk assessment, Rareloop created a charting engine to graphically show a patients risk of osteoporotic fracture.
The chart, along with the summary of the patients answers, were included on the optional printout. This enabled practitioners to get a better understanding of the patients risk and the specific factors that contributed to it.
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