Background

Aktiia is a blood pressure tracking device that measures your blood pressure continuously using a light sensor. It connects to your phone via bluetooth and shows your blood pressure data on the companion native applications.

During a discovery project to better understand our patient customers, we identified an opportunity to assist healthcare professionals in caring for their hypertensive patients. This also had the added benefit of improving our patients experience with Aktiia.

Other contributors

External development agency, Business development manager, Product manager

Lead Product Designer

I worked with the Product manager to research and conceptualise the idea of a remote patient monitoring solution for healthcare professionals. I assisted with interviews conducted with healthcare professionals as well as designing the initial MVP solution including user flow diagrams and high fidelity solutions. I worked alongside the external development agency to manage the implementation of the solution.

Connect healthcare professionals and our patients through the power of Aktiia data

We had access to data that could benefit millions. We wanted to make that data and experience available to as many people as we could.

Problem statement

• Although patients might be receiving more blood pressure data than ever before, it’s not available to their doctor who is a vital decision maker in their healthcare journey.

What if

• We could create a way for patients and healthcare providers to connect using Aktiia and share in the valuable and easily accessible data measured by their bracelet?

• Aktiia was an option provided by a doctor to their patients at the beginning of their journey?

Project objectives and key results

Objectives

• Speak with potential customers from different backgrounds to understand Healthcare professional needs.

• Create an MVP solution so we can validate whether our solution creates the patient / doctor connection we are missing.

• Run a siloed pilot to see whether this is a viable project for Aktiia.

Key results

• Exhaustive understanding of pain and obstacles healthcare providers face when helping patients with their blood pressure.

• Gain qualitative data from doctors, healthcare providers and specialists on the idea of a platform where they could view patient blood pressure data.

• At least 3 providers come on board to trial the product.

Understanding patient customer needs through personas and user journeys

We took inspiration from Disney>Airbnb's method of creating user stories to better understand their journey and map out their ideal Aktiia experience. This allowed us to identify key moments in patients journey that we could improve.

Key insights from interviews

• Time was their most valuable resource.

• It takes a long time to get a patients blood pressure under control.

• It had to integrate with their their existing systems and patient records.

• Medication is normally the solution to high blood pressure.

The MVP of the MVP solution

We built a dashboard utilising anonymised customer data using Google Data Studio to test what information is most important to Healthcare professionals.

We went back to our same group of Healthcare professionals to see if this prototype aligned with their vision of a tool that could help them.

Key insights from interviews

• Time was their most valuable resource.

• It takes a long time to get a patients blood pressure under control.

• It had to integrate with their their existing systems and patient records.

• Medication is normally the solution to high blood pressure.

Building the journey

We spent a large portion of time building out the journeys of the web app. Doing this work up front would minimise the effort in the long run when designing high fidelity mock ups.

The MVP solution

Utilising the refined user flow diagrams mapping out the different experiences of the MVP, we put together some low fidelity screens.

Due to our already launched consumer facing app, we actually already had a lot of the UI already defined in our design system. For that reason we quickly moved to more high fidelity mockups.

Easy patient management

Connecting with NHS electronic health record systems would take 1+ years. We made the decision to allow providers to connect with their patients via email initially with the long term goal of integrating with their platform in the future.

Patient analysis and triage

We designed a novel experience, the Aktiia status. This was new to Aktiia and required input from our CMO to validate our thinking. The idea was that healthcare professionals could at a glance understand the status of their patients and their short term progress. This also enabled them to easily triage their patients based on who needs the most attention.

Easy patient tracking

We provided doctors with the same data provided to patients plus additional durations to fit their needs of seeing how patient data varied over time.

Prototype testing with Figma

We utilised the wants, needs and insight from our previous discovery interviews to frame the interview script we would use in our final user testing interviews.

Google sheets plugin

• We utilised real anonymised data when building mockups and prototypes to ensure an accurate representation of a healthcare dashboard.

Charts plugin

• To reduce time the design team spent on creating charts, we used the charts plugin and utilised real anonymised data to ensure an accurate representation.

Backup connection method with patients not viable

We could easily connect existing Aktiia customers with their GP via email. But when doctors wanted to bring in new customers who weren’t on Aktiia, they didn’t have their emails.

We discovered that the predominant communication method was through SMS.

We identified another method to make the process of onboarding patients as easy as possible. This was using the Accuryx SMS platform that NHS GPs connect with today to contact their patients.

New journey for connections

We designed a flow where doctors could generate a message to send to their patients on bulk through their account on Accuryx which linked to the GP account on the Healthcare platform.When a patient created an Aktiia account, they would automatically be linked to their GP.

Healthcare providers could now easily utilise their existing communication method with customers and send bulk messages to their blood pressure patients to join Aktiia.

This connection method was a more efficient way for patients to connect with their doctor. Also, as the message was coming directly from their doctor as other messages would, we could also utilise the trust patients have with their doctor to maximise conversion.

Learnings

The base solution was very popular and doctors were impressed about this new level of information without having to chase patients to measure their BP.

Although the Accuryx SMS solution solved the immediate problem. Customer’s still wanted a direct integration into their own systems to reduce crossover between multiple platforms.

Iteratively improve our new product vertical

There are 2 directions we will be taking this new product vertical. There are a number of issues to fix and small features to add to improve the initial MVP experience.

We also have a number of ideas to continue to radically revolutionise the healthcare space for blood pressure management. The next steps are to prototype some of the ideas we've had and put them in front of healthcare professionals again to gauge their reaction.

Idea 1

What if... we enabled patients to connect directly through the consumer app with their GP or Aktiia Partner doctor for faster care?

Idea 2

What if... we could provide the tools to empower doctors to prescribe and send medication to their patients

Idea 3

What if... we could integrate our Aktiia lifestyle change content and allow healthcare providers to send it to their patients?