--- Kidney Daily: Improve chronic patients’ experience in the
waiting room of Kidney Center before consultations
/Project info
Project length: 2month research + 2month design
Project type: Individual work
Skills: User&context research, rapid-prototyping, information structure
#Product service system
#Clinical experience
#Value-based healthcare
The department of kidney failure, VU university medical center Amsterdam (VUmc), is currently searching for ways on how to implement a new strategy called value-based healthcare. Value-based healthcare is a patient-centered strategy promoted by hospitals, beneficial for all parties involved: improved health outcomes can relieve patient suffering and minimizing the cost of care is beneficial for all stakeholders. The main goal of the kidney department is to guide patients in choosing the best suitable treatment option, which requires a lot of decision making, making it a highly suitable topic to implement value-based healthcare. A solution will be created through this project to implement this strategy into the pretreatment process of kidney failure patients.
To implement value-based healthcare in the department of kidney failure, the kidney team established a regular consulting mechanism: caroussel meeting, during which the patients will visit all specialists of the kidney team in one morning. This carousel is repeated each month for as many times as needed for the patient to be able to make a treatment choice. This journey will be adjusted per patient, depending on the kidney situation, level of foreknowledge, the capability to process information, and emotional state. Between each meeting, due to the delay of the previous consultation or the need to detect certain health indicators in advance, the patient needs to wait in the waiting room for 10-60 minutes until the expert picks them up to the consultation room.
The implement of Value-based healthcare (VBH) can be beneficial for all stakeholders, but also can be a challenge for them, for this strategy has changed the role of Kidney team, from original professional doctors into consultants who establish a personal relationship with the patients.
Although the team tried to help patients understand participating in their care process, shared decision making and multidisciplinary collaboration, because of the order and amount of consultations are dependent on many aspects, it is hard for the patient to anticipate the steps in the pre-treatment process. Patients feel overwhelmed and unsure, feeling a loss of control and facing a large amount of knowledge they need to know, mixed with their anxiety and confusion, making the effect of VBH far away from expectation.
At the same time, because the patients do not cooperate, this also causes extra stress for the team members. Patience is not the only thing they need, but also extra energy, communication skills and tools. Under this circumstance, the whole pre-treatment process is extended to be longer, costing more, as well as the decision making is postponed.
To solve these problems, a product-service-system concept is created for VUmc. The concept provides patients with a new experience spending time in Niercentrum before their consultations via the redesigned space ‘patient community’, where they can choose to stay by their own preferences at the resting area or social area with corresponding furniture settings.
In this patient community, except the rearranged interior, an information feeding and generating system ‘KIDNEY DAILY’ is introduced. KIDNEY DAILY is a tailored and regularly updated newspaper for information exchange among patient peers, preparation for consultations as well as useful, targeted and easy knowledge feeding. The whole concept aims to connect patients together via the provided environment and
information sharing and exchanging.
︎ Relieve patient’s anxiety and feeling of lost Help patients make use of time while waiting for consultation
︎More life-related and concerned info Personalized information sharing and exchange among peers;
︎Connect peers Trigger communication among peers from the action using the printer;
︎Shared-decision making Help patients to be more participant and self-conscious in the whole process by inspiring them to prepare more for the consultations.
Go to Research Elaboration ︎︎︎
The concept is finally evaluated by role-playing and a presentation for VUmc, the project client. It is believed as a promising strategy to increase patients’ positive involvement in treatment decision making as well as to support the consultation team with a more efficient workflow of consultations, commented by the nursing specialists and physicians from Kidney center of VUmc.
