Week 3: Report of progress
The asthma journey
While mapping the journey of an asthma patient from symptom discovery and diagnosis to long term management, we realized there was a really interesting period when a child is put on a trial treatment for a 4–6 weeks. The child’s symptoms and responses to medication during that period ultimately informs the physician’s diagnosis and longer term treatment plan. This can also be a time of uncertainty for the parent and the child, as they are having to quickly learn how to manage new medications and deal with the emotional implications of having asthma.
Our service proposition
Our service improves communication and information exchange between physicians, parents, and young asthma patients during the diagnosis and initial trial treatment period in order to improve a physician’s diagnostic confidence and make the experience less emotionally traumatic for patients and parents.
We imagine this service experience as anchored in an asthma adventure storyline, where children (and their parents) are on a journey to uncover clues to inform their diagnosis: their symptoms over time, triggers, and responses to medication which feed back to the doctor to inform their diagnosis and development of a long term management plan
Possible service touchpoints
Within this service concept, we have started to explore ideas for possible touchpoints:
- We could imagine that this service experience would start in the doctor’s office, during the child’s first diagnostic appointment with an asthma specialist or pediatrician. We can imagine a scenario where a child is introduced to their asthma adventure story in the exam room and as part of their training for how to use their trial medications
- When the child leaves the doctor’s office the story could come with them in the form of an interactive iPad app that contains a storybook and targeted daily questions about symptoms, triggers, and emotions.
- The data collected in the app could then be fed back into a dashboard for a doctor to monitor a child’s progress and inform their diagnosis and long term management plan
Mapping the value flows
With the focus on the trial diagnosis period, we have started to create a value flow diagram to better understand the types of information and value that may be exchanged between stakeholders. The primary stakeholders within our service proposition are the doctor, child, and parent. However we also recognized that there may be other stakeholders within the system that are also relevant within our service and are worth exploring further.
Data types
Given this diagram, we imagine we will be integrating the following types of data at this point, but want to validate these assumptions further with physicians and parents:
- Basic medical data (height, weight, age)
- Treatment plan details/ medication schedule
- Tracking of medication ingestion
- Symptom reporting
- Emotion reporting
- Weather data
- Pollen ratings
- Activity tracker?
Customer journey map
Outstanding questions
Since we have narrowed in on a direction with our service proposition, we have realized there are a number of more targeted questions we have that we would like to explore further in interviews and through secondary research:
- What are the most important pieces of data that a physician needs during the trial treatment process? Are some types of symptoms more important to record than other ones?
- What types of information inform the long term management approach?
- What are 4–6 year olds into these days? What types of stories engage them?
- What is a 4–6 year olds ability to recall experiences from their day at nighttime?
- What types of directions can a 4–6 year old follow?
- What are the hardest parts about a trial treatment process?
Next steps
At this point in the process, we have conducted a decent amount of secondary research and have had one interview with a physician. However, we will be focusing over the next week on interviewing as many physicians and parents as possible.
- Interviews with 2–3 physicians
- Interviews with parents of 4–6 yr old, asthma patients (if possible)
- Refining the data and value flows
- Refine our user journey understanding
- Continue ideating concept ideas and possible touch points
- Start exploring how we can evaluate this concept with kids
