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Beyond Compliance, Adherence, & Concordance - Supporting The Patient’s Implementation Of Optimal Treatment

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Designing Treatment Planning For Treatment Adherence

September 26th, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Allan Showalter, MD · Patient's Role · No Comments

Now this is interesting - and in a good way for a change



Using Design To Investigate and Address The Unpredictable Emotions and Behavior Of Patients

Brandon Discusses the Role of Emotion in Experience with Ryan Armbruster, Mayo Clinic is an essay arising from a conversation between Brandon Schauer, an experience design director1 for Adaptive Path, a design firm, and Ryan Armbruster, Director of Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Program.2 Much of the discussion centers on the re-engineering of the medication prescription process as an example of a SPARC program project.

A project last year looked at the medication prescription process, and how that influences patients’ adherence to their medication and their medical outcome. We know that in certain situations, a patients’ adherence to those medications is frequently the biggest opportunity space to improve outcomes. One of those situations is in diabetes medications. When patients start on diabetic medications, they often don’t closely adhere to the prescribed protocol for the medication. In the case of diabetes that creates a particular problem because in order to really start seeing impacts from many of the diabetes medications you have to be on them for a number of months. It’s a huge opportunity to uncover what we as a provider organization might do to really improve those outcomes.

Armbruster describes how they assessed the situation and devised a system using “Decision Cards” that incorporates the specific patient’s concerns, understanding, and emotions into the treatment planning process to give that patient a greater investment in the decision, which, in turn, could lead to improved adherence to that treatment.

I know too little about the system they are implementing to comment on its utility or likelihood of success. I am convinced, on the other hand, that Armbruster is onto something that healthcare professionals as a group seem to have overlooked:

What’s interesting in healthcare — as well as any service industry — is how to deal most effectively with the uncertainty of human emotions and human behavior. Emotion is complex. It’s not a rational system. As much as you want to try to design a service or a system that’s reliable and consistent, it won’t be effective if it doesn’t adapt to the many different situations that are present in the complexity of human emotions. But when you successfully design for emotion, it can dramatically influence the outcomes, such as a patients’ health.

Again, the report of this stimulating conversation can be found at ~ Brandon Discusses the Role of Emotion in Experience with Ryan Armbruster, Mayo Clinic ~

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Further Reading: Those interested in Mayo’s Sparc will find a plethora of articles available. My favorite, which I heartily recommend, especially to those discovering SPARC for the first time, is a piece from Fast Company, a business periodical:
~ A Prescription for Innovation ~.



Footnotes

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  1. I’m unsure of the functions of an “experience design director,” but I do like the sound of the title and am currently considering adopting a variation of it for my own designation↩
  2. SPARC is a clinical innovation lab that uses principles of design to focus on the patient experience.↩

Tags: Patient's Role