Using Self-Care to Drive Health Outcomes

I am currently working with a healthcare client to help build a mobile app that will support their maternal population. We have been working on the effort for almost a year and are finally starting to see the fruits of our labor. I am lucky to have an amazing client manager who truly understands the value of using technology to drive positive improvements to health outcomes. Not to say that the road to build and deliver this solution has been easy. In fact, it has been enlightening (focus group feedback) and disappointing (information security challenges) all at the same time. But we have stayed true to the vision that we developed. At least so far. I was recently looking back at some of the work we did a year ago to define the experience we wanted for our population. And then I compared it to what we had built in our initial solution. It is always exciting to see a strategy develop, and even more so when there is an opportunity that the solution will save lives.

I thought I would share one of the models we developed to help communicate one of our key vision points regarding the idea of linking Self-Care to Outcomes. Our vision was that a pregnant woman could use the mobile application to perform self-care functions such as making a prenatal appointment with their obstetrician. We assumed that making the appointment would drive the outcomes. But after analyzing existing research and reviewing the efforts that others have done in this space, it became obvious that we could potentially have pockets of "no-shows" as high as 15-20% (concentrated urban areas). Doesn't do much good to enable simple appointment scheduling if the consumer doesn't make it to the appointment.  The real value of the mobile application is in removing any barriers or obstacles that might exist for that consumer to make and keep and that appointment. Focus groups helped us to better understand what keeps the consumer from getting to the appointment and we determined that scheduling transportation was a key barrier. Once we understood this, we extend the scope of making an appointment to include the scheduling of the transportation, ideally done at the same time. That may be a simple, some might say obvious adjustment, but it has the potential to make a significant impact on the outcomes we are trying to hard to to improve.

Figure 1

This was just one example and the figure above shows a few more areas that benefit from this extension. We now have incorporated this type of model into our idea generation and review process. This obviously applies beyond the type of program we are leveraging it for. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!