Organizations: UChicago Medicine, National Science Foundation, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship
Collaborators: Lindsay Zimmerman, Michael Cui, Sonia Chokshi
Dates: 2018-2020
Focus: User Research, Digital Tools, Data Science
Overview:
Socium Health is led by an interdisciplinary team of physicians and data scientists based out of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. We research patient-provider communication to design and build the most effective interaction paradigms. Our first focus areas are care coordination with a focus on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Example Research: Design Sprint
To ground our work, we conducted a design sprint over 3-days: Day 1, Understand and Define; Day 2, Sketch and Decide; Day 3, Prototype and Validate.
Our primary sprint challenge question was, How might we empower COPD patients to understand their healthcare information, make decisions in partnership with their providers, and more easily manage their health in their daily life?
Example Prototype: Care Coordination Augmentation
To close out our Design Sprint, we developed a provider-facing prototype to enable automated phone outreach. Using a HIPAA compliant REDCap interface, our provider teams were provided a centralized application to manage prototype scripts, collect patient/call information, and visualize patient call status.
Provider Prototype: Validated data entry forms collect patient information and actions taken on each call. Visual Record Status Dashboards provide provider teams with a three-color coding system to assess the status of each patient.
Next, we developed a data science pipeline to analyze data from our provider-facing prototypes. This workflow provided a core feedback loop from current experiments. We focused on understanding key differences within provider workflows and patient panels.
Analysis Pipeline & Key Insights: Of all attempted proactive outreach efforts, Tuesdays during the late afternoon and Saturday mornings were the best days and times to reach patients (>65% successful outreach). We are seeing early validation of our hypothesis that many patients are easier to reach outside of standard working hours.
Published Results
In Spring 2020, we published an abstract of our learnings — Application of Design Sprint Methodology to Prototype a Proactive Outreach Tool for COPD Patients — at Translational Medicine 2020. Going forward, our team continues to research and share insights from digital outreach tools for chronic conditions.