Challenge
Create a platform to track hypertension of patients to increase the control rate.  

Outcome
An android app, a web-based application and a printed card called BP Passport.

Tags
#systemdesign
#healthcare
#mobileapp

High blood pressure (BP) is ranked as the third most important risk factor for the attributable burden of disease in South Asia (2010). Hypertension (HTN) exerts a substantial public health burden on cardiovascular health status and healthcare systems in India. HTN is directly responsible for 57% of all stroke deaths and 24% of all coronary heart disease (CHD) deaths in India. The WHO rates HTN as one of the most important causes of premature death worldwide.

The project, Simple aims to reduce the number of people dying from heart disease and strokes in low and middle-income countries and is supported by Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of the not-for-profit Vital Strategies. 

Nurses and clinicians play an active role to ensure patients receive regular check-ups, but in a large country like India, a typical nurse sees around a hundred patients a day. Facilities don’t have a standardised patient flow and tracking individual patient is very difficult.

Be able to fit into existing & extremely busy workflows

Easy to learn and use, even for first time smartphone users

Offline first

A rural health facility room.

Children's ward.

Govt's health campaign posters are put up in the waiting area.

To better understand the context we were dealing with, we observed the real users in the field. We interviewed around nearly 200 doctors and nurses and worked with them to develop concepts through iterative prototyping and testing. To fit ourselves into their shoes we simulated a clinic at our office to chart out scenarios and relevant artefacts and created a clinic experience by creating role-plays.

We were able to come up with a solution that was novel and scalable.

Simple is a mobile app that enables healthcare workers to track blood pressure levels of hypertensive patients, maintain their medication and schedule their subsequent visits by presenting the information in a time-effective manner to improve the hypertension control rate. A web-based dashboard helps health system managers collect feedback from their facilities to make decisions to improve hypertension control rate. 

I’ve worked as a product designer on this project for six months and have got the opportunity to visit the field for user testing and work on some workflows of the app that are shown below.

Onboarding
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The design philosophy behind Simple is to keep the product as simple as possible to prevent its users from the need for prerequisite smartphone experience. Keeping that in mind, the on-boarding screen must communicate the product’s intent in a few seconds.

Progress Tab
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Nurses want to be informed about how their facility is doing in managing the patients and what areas they need to improve upon. This can be tracked by Progress Tab on the app. The design team ideated on some ideas and I took the responsibility to flesh them out. We performed card sorting exercise with the users to learn what they find relevant and prioritised the cards accordingly. You can also read up about the field exercise.

Other Contributions
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Product thinking is critical to bringing ease of use to a user. While working on help for Simple, meticulous care was given on how the user can a user be helped in a state of panic, the contents that are important and how can they be best presented.

On the 2nd screen, an affordance next to medicine's strength makes it very clear that nurses can change the strength on tapping that. Without the affordance earlier, nurses feared that tapping on strength would uncheck the medicine.

Country and Medicine selection screens from the app.

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