Current trends have expanded the role that people play in monitoring, managing, and making decisions about their health. Whether people are selecting the right health insurance plan, evaluating treatment options, or trying to comprehend and gain actionable insight from complex medical tests or their own fitness data, they are often faced with complex and unfamiliar information and data. Failure to make sense of this information can lead to anxiety, poor decisions, and missed learning opportunities. User experience professionals have an important role to play in improving health care by facilitating comprehension, clarity and actionable insight. In this session we will discuss how to design experiences that support complex decisions and sense-making in the healthcare space. You’ll learn how different types of users approach diverse health information and offer you practical guidance on how to improve their experiences.

1. Coping with Complexity
in Health Care
Enabling Sense-making through Great UX

2. medullanD I G I TA L . H E A LT H . I N N O VAT I O N . F O R B E T T E R L I V E S .

3. Rebecca Lord
Director, UX
Tim Merrill
Sr. Manager, UX
Rob Gifford
Sr. Associate, UX
Who Are We?

4. Innovation for
better lives
Improve the healthcare experience by designing and
developing solutions which engage healthcare
consumers and facilitate business transformation
Our Mission:

5. Product
Strategy
UX/UI Design
& Testing
Technology
Implementation
What Do We Do?
We design solutions that engage
users across the healthcare spectrum through:

6. Healthcare is huge.
17%of money made in U.S.
comes from healthcare
Complexity in Healthcare

7. It effects us at every point of our lives..
Financially Well-being
Complexity in Healthcare

8. Trends converging
Advancements
in Science
Policy
New
Technology
Users
Highly
regulated
Legacy
systems

9. It’s confusing.
Insurance coverage
Patient outcomes
Care management
Clinical research
Wellness
Managing
chronic conditions

10. UX can help people feel
empowered
UX+ =
Empathy Systems thinking Psychology
Information design

11. Let’s dig into a few ways UX can solve health care complexity:
Making decisions about health coverage
Making sense of medical information
Taking advantage of the sea of health data
1
2
3

12. And how?
Experience models and frameworks
Familiar design patterns
Cognitive computing
1
2
3

13. Complex Health
Coverage Decisions
Rob Gifford

14. Meet Amy…
26 years old
She just finished her Master of
Social Work Degree
Landed a job at a local non-profit
First full-time job with benefits

15. Well, sort of…
Rather than offering traditional benefits,
Amy’s employer is offering
health coverage through a
Health Insurance Exchange

16. Health insurance exchanges are
marketplaces for health plans.
Millions of employees are now
receiving coverage through public and
private exchange.
Health exchanges explained

17. That’s great for employees, right?
Employers love exchanges
because they make costs predictable
and provide plenty of options for employees.
Health exchanges explained

18. More choices often lead
to more anxiety & regret
and lower satisfaction.
The Paradox of Choice

19. Unlike porridge and jam,
health insurance is complex.
Amy’s Paradox
She’s being tasked to pick the option that will lead to
the right level of coverage for her.
More options = more confusion & potential regret

20. Traditional decision theory says the
most accurate decisions are made using a
weighted-additive approach
How do does Amy decide?

21. Plans differ on a variety
of attributes
• Co-pay
• Deductibles
• Co-insurance
• Out-of-pocket max
• Amount of providers
• In-network vs. out-of-
network costs
Insurance plans
are complicated

22. This is Amy’s first job with benefits
Things are starting to get complicated…
Which attributes are important?
There is a lot of uncertainty.

23. Currently, Amy is not in
the happy quadrant.
How UX can help
How do we move her?
Abilitydecisionmaker
Simplicity of choice
Decision Complexity

24. Educate her about which attributes of insurance
plans are most important and remove irrelevant data
Design information so that important plan attributes of a decision are
prominently displayed
How UX can help
1

25. How UX can help
Ask Amy about her health care needs in plain
language and analyze our plans for her.
2

26. Using our knowledge of
her, we can narrow down
plans to a few
meaningful options
framed in a logical order.
How UX can help
3

27. We can format plan information to facilitate clear
comparison between plan attributes that matter most
How UX can help
4

28. By employing these
techniques, we simplified
Amy’s choice and empower
her with a better
understanding of her options.
Abilitydecisionmaker
Simplicity of choice
Decision Complexity
How UX can help

29. A High Deductible Plan with an Health Savings Account
Why? She's relatively young and has few health
conditions. It’s the most affordable option while also
insuring she was prepared in case anything did happen.
What did Amy decide?

30. Amy can have confidence in her choice.
She also has a few extra dollars each month
to pay for her vacation (she’ll need it).

31. Making Sense of
Medical Information
Rebecca Lord

32. Complex medical
information
surrounds us
Making sense of it is
challenging, yet people
need to make important
decisions, potentially life
changing decisions,
based on this information

33. And it’s not getting
any simpler
Full genome sequencing
is becoming readily
available and more popular
It provides a map of your
unique makeup and finds
variations that may cause
disease or affect your risk
for disease
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

34. Our Challenge in UX…
Make complex medical information
understandable, meaningful, and
actionable.

35. Meet Jack…
Works for a software company in business
development
Married with two kids
Loves running and getting outside
Generally healthy guy

36. Jack decided to have his full genome
sequenced two years ago. Why?
Know thyself. He wanted a better understanding
of who he was from a health perspective.
“Is there something I can be doing to take
better care of myself that I’m not aware of?”
Also, geeky curiosity. Jack has a masters in
chemistry and is passionate about the trends in
genomic diagnostics.

37. But…
When he accessed his
reports, Jack was left feeling
confused and frustrated.

38. The interfaces he
experienced had
major flaws
Primary screens didn’t
support confident exploration
Interactive visualizations were
too complicated to be
valuable
Most content was too
technical to understand
No tools to facilitate
connection and collaboration

39. Despite the bad UX…
Jack learned a few things.

41. Seriously, after many hours of exploring his
genome, Jack learned:
He has a variant on SCN5A
gene which is associated with
Romano-Ward syndrome.
A common symptom is light-
headedness during intense
exercise.

42. This explains why:
Jack passed out a mile
from the finish line at
the Boston Marathon a
few years ago.

43. This surprising information gave Jack a sense
of relief and motivated him to change…
He only competes in shorter road races — half-
marathons are just fine!
And always runs with friends, just in case.

44. Remember, Jack is special…
He’s got a masters in chemistry
He’s familiar with and passionate about
genomics
He’s already pretty healthy

45. We’re not all chemists and for many
people, seeing their genomic results
will be emotionally charged. How can
we make this a better experience?

46. We’ve already got
the tools
Familiar design patterns
and principles can
transform the experience
of consuming complex
medical information

47. Design for real
people,
not scientists
Tool tips
Auto-suggest
Inline help

48. Support confident
exploration and
learning
Search
Faceted navigation
Personalized spotlighting

49. Create a sense of
community and
support
Forums
Direct & group messaging
Friends/connections
Donation tools

50. Enable continued
learning and
collaboration
Bookmarks
Notebooks/boards
Social sharing

51. Using familiar
design patterns
and principles can
transform the
experience of
consuming
complex medical
information

52. Cognitive Computing
Actionable Insights from a
Sea of Medical Data
Tim Merrill

53. Improve patient outcomes
Improve quality of care
Reduce costs
Reduce re-admissions
Promote healthy behaviors
Challenging Themes in Healthcare

54. Help people make
better decisions

55. Staggering amount of data
at our fingertips

56. How do we
help people
make sense?

57. Traditional Analytics?

58. The Dawn of
Cognitive Computing

59. Cognitive computing is
the simulation of human thought
processes in a computerized model.

60. Data mining
Unstructured data processing,
including natural language and images
Awareness of context
What does that mean?

61. Sounds awesome.
And yet entirely impractical
for my project.

62. Nope.

63. ‹#›page© Medullan Inc.

64. What can Watson do now?
Understand the relationship between
speech patterns and
known personality traits
Explore tradeoffs when faced with
multiple dimensions of important data
Provide a natural language question and
answer service

65. What can Watson do for
healthcare?

66. Radiology and
Cardiology:
Medical Sieve

67. Watson helps
patients get health
and wellness
information

68. Watson
helps
doctors
diagnose
and
treat
cancer
patients
Watson
vs.
Cancer

69. Now it’s your turn.

70. Cognitive computing
is a now just another tool
for your UX toolbelt.

71. Watson’s Available Services (APIs)
Concept
Expansion
Personality
Insights
Concept
Insights
Message
Resonance
Relationship
Extraction
Tradeoff
Analytics
Visualization
Rendering
Question and
Answer
Visual
Recognition
Speech to
Text
Text to
Speech
Language
Identification
Machine
Translation

72. Personality Insights
Demo

73. • Play: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud
• Find a good problem to solve
• Gather the right data sources
• Train it on the data - build a “corpus”
• Design the interface
• Plan for feedback loop
How do I use it?

74. • Watson APIs: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/
developercloud/services-catalog.html
• Healthcare questions demo (https://watsonhealthqa.mybluemix.net/)
• Gallery: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/
developercloud/gallery.html
• Open Source Github Resources: https://github.com/watson-
developer-cloud
• http://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/details/
Resources

75. Wrap up

76. Great UX solves real problems in health care:
Making decisions about health coverage
Making sense of medical information
Taking advantage of the sea of health data
1
2
3

77. And how?
Experience models and frameworks
Familiar design patterns
Cognitive computing
1
2
3

78. Thank you