PERSONALIZED PREGNANCY CARE

Personalized pregnancy care

Ineo focuses on making the communication between expectant mothers and midwives more personal. It provides a clear overview of the personalized pregnancy process, helps expectant mothers and midwives prepare for their meetings and minimizes the midwife's administrative tasks. It covers the whole pregnancy process from the first check-in to the local midwife unit after birth.

Brief: Develop a feasible solution for personalised prenatal care services that could be implemented within a few years. In collaboration with Region Skåne & Innovation Skåne.
Target group: Midwives and expectant mothers
Team: Robin Harnesk, Johan Hultman, Igor Kovtun, Nathalie Strindlund, Rebecka Wärulf
My roles: research, interviews, co-work sessions, UX design
Duration: 10 weeks
Methods/tools: Workshops, Interviews, Adobe Photoshop, Keynote

This was my final project in the course Service Design. It was developed for Region Skåne & Innovation Skåne and has afterwards been used by them as inspiration for their new service.

DIGITAL APPLICATION

The service has two interface ends. For the expectant mothers, Ineo would become a new official pregnancy care platform for preparing their appointments and communicating with health care providers.

It provides a timeline that can be created and adapted to each expectant mother. By typing in the date of their most recent menstrual period, the service can calculate when the she should have her first meeting with her midwife and their expected delivery date.

For the healthcare providers, it would replace the existing scheduling and journaling systems. Ineo will also be connected with the medical journal, allowing the midwife to quickly find more detailed information about patients when necessary.

Expectant mothers can use Ineo on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms to allow for more flexibility and efficiency. As they can add and access information at any time, it becomes easier both for them and the midwife to prepare for appointments.

Ineo adapts the pregnancy process to each expectant mother by suggesting actions based on the information they or the midwife provides to the service.

DESIGN PROCESS

The project started with background research where we reviewed existing pregnancy apps and read up online to get an overview of what information the expectant mothers can find and how easily accessed it is. This formed the foundation for a user journey where we mapped out physiological changes for mother and child as well as all medical appointments happening throughout a pregnancy. We also identified all stakeholders involved in this process and created a communication map between the different pregnancy care providers involved in a woman’s pregnancy.

We could see that current services tend to focus on providing generalised information with few options for personalisation. At the same time, most services overload users with data, trying to provide all possible information at once, which makes it difficult to get an overview of the whole pregnancy process.

Interviews

Thereafter, we conducted four interviews with expectant mothers/new mothers and three with a midwife to understand how this process looks in practise. Through this, we understood the midwife´s way of working, how she communicates with her patients and stakeholders as well as the expectant mothers´ lifestyle and experience from midwife units.

From this, we got a more precise overview of all the medical appointments and an understanding of the healthcare flow and rhythm. We saw that there was an uneven activity rhythm where some weeks are overloaded with meetings and activities, while other weeks are completely empty.

The expectant mothers felt left out during the “empty” weeks, while our midwife felt stressed about providing all the necessary information during the intense weeks. To balance the overloaded weeks, midwives are coming up with different workarounds, such as an extracurricular meeting at week 20 that they called the "Life hack meeting". During the empty weeks, our midwife reported that expectant mothers are recommended to call the midwife center or find information on the internet.

Observations

We also got the chance to visit our midwife and observe five different appointments with expectant mothers. During these observations, we focused on the communication between the midwife and the expectant mother and on the internal digital systems that were used during the meetings. We paid close attention to how pregnancy care providers adjust their treatment and information for each woman’s situation and needs and learned that the meetings are short and standardised, leaving little room for women to communicate their needs and for midwives to be flexible with the process.

We discovered that the communication between the pregnancy care providers is facilitated through a variety of different channels. Additionally, their shared medical journal consists of notes that differ in length, structure and information with no way of categorising the content which makes it hard for the midwife to find time to prepare for meetings with expectant mothers. This also leads to the expectant mothers often having to start from scratch when they meet new health care personnel.

Analysis

Our research showed that there is currently very little personalisation of the pregnancy process. Midwives are obliged to follow standard procedure but would like more time and better tools to adjust the process according to individual needs of their patients. In addition, first-time expectant mothers feel like the process is impersonal and that their needs are not accounted for. From this, we identified a few recurring themes:

COMMUNICATION
The communication between healthcare providers is inefficient and inconsistent

PREPARATION
Expectant mothers want to feel acknowledged by pregnancy care providers and treated in a well-prepared and personal manner

PROCEDURES
The midwife wants to provide more flexible treatment without compromising the standard procedure

We chose to tackle the communication since it seemed like making the communication more effective and consistent for all parties could also make it easier for the midwife to prepare meetings, and by that, also meet every expectant mother´s personal needs. We then formed two research questions for ideation:

How might we help expectant mothers define and communicate their personal needs to the pregnancy care providers?

How might we help pregnancy care providers account for personal needs without compromising the standard procedure?

Co-design sessions

With focus on designing a pregnancy plan, we carried out one co-design workshop with our midwife and one with an expectant mother in order to get their different perspectives. Both workshops consisted of an exercise where we created a graph with two axes; one stating the priority of a task and the other if it can be done at a distance or if it needs to be done at the midwife unit.

The midwife has lots of administrative work which results in not having enough time to build the deeper contact and trust with the expectant mother which is necessary to work with their mental health. This correlates to whether things could be done at home or if they have to be made at the midwife unit where it is easier for them to form a personal contact.

The communication between them happens via an outdated system consisting of paperwork and phone calls, which means that a lot of the expectant mothers´ questions remain unanswered and the midwife´s information is lost. There we found an opportunity to create a digital platform where all of this could be stored and be easily accessed by both parts.

Ideation and development

We brainstormed around a service that would meet both the midwife´s and the expectant mother´s needs. We came up with a digital service that provides expectant mothers with a personalised overview of their pregnancy and help them and their healthcare providers prepare for the upcoming meetings. At the same time, it relieves the midwife from tasks taking up unecessary time as much information can be stored and read before appointments.

The typical visual appearance of healthcare applications tend to be anonymous and formal and often include the colors blue and green. To move away from the hospital association these applications can bring, we chose to use a color spectrum of apricot, pink, and purple and include several decorative elements within the Ineo interface. We aimed to find a good balance between looking inviting and interesting but not too playful so that it creates the impression of being a serious and reliable service.

REFLECTION

Ineo is one application competing with many others which may not be very innovative from an interaction design perspective. However, the ultimate goal with Ineo was to redesign the midwife’s distribution of time between her daily tasks so that she has more time to prepare for a more personal contact with the expectant mother during their meetings. And for that, it seemed to be an effective solution for both parties. It was really fun working for real stakeholders as we got to understand their situation very well and could be confident that our solution would tackle real problems. What I am happy with about this project is that it provides co-creation and co-value for both parties, which is important for service design. The data stored in Ineo can become a centre for communication during meetings, which means it can continue providing value even after use as it is likely the personal contact forming out of this that is really essential to the experience of a more personalized pregnancy care.

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