While we had selected a problem area given to us by our sponsor, my team knew virtually nothing about the space save for what we knew as patients ourselves. We set about conducting both secondary and primary research to better understand what the current state of the doctor's appointment experience was for patients of varying backgrounds and health journeys.

Something that became clear to me early one was that sentiment varied greatly between patients who suffered from chronic conditions vs patients who did not.

Patients with chronic conditions had much more polarizing sentiments on their healthcare experience. In order to investigate this, I talked to patients with chronic conditions about their healthcare journey.

We now knew intimately how thoroughly the current American healthcare system was failing patients dealing with chronic conditions.

But, what did people working in the system think? What systemic problems exist that place so much of the burden of care on patients dealing with their chronic conditions?

I talked to a group of healthcare subject matter experts to figure out what was happening on a larger scale in healthcare.

The last piece of my research consisted of talking to doctors to figure out how they navigated patient care.

A common theme arose from talking to the patients and providers.

Patients were overwhelmed trying to keep track of all their health information, this was made worse for patients with chronic conditions who must go to the doctor more frequently (which means more doctor's notes, more medications, and treatment plans) and across multiple doctors.

Providers talked about how modernized digital EMR systems allowed them to input more information about their patients during their appointment. Unfortunately, this meant that doctors had more and more tasks relating to information maintenance. These tasks were things they were not compensated for as they did not directly relate to the care of the patient.

From here, I saw a more specific problem my team could tackle: the modernizing of healthcare record systems has led to a collective inability to manage all of the information in a meaningful and effective way.

We established 5 primary goals we wanted to accomplish through our design. These goals focused on enhancing communication between doctors and patients as well as helping patients understand their own health information with minimal effort.

After refining our health module designs, we tested our designs with patients who we interviewed during the beginning part of our research.

How does our final design translate into the design goals we set out to meet?

At the center of our design, modules make health information accessible and personalizable to patients, allowing them to see their own health information in ways that make sense to them and tell a clear health journey story. The ability to save and access multiple forms of communication often forgotten by existing EMR systems such as instant messaging allow health nuggets through these conversations to be preserved and acted upon.