The goal of this project was to help hospitals reduce the costs associated with their patients returning to receive additional care for the same ailments, and to help patients follow their doctor’s advice and live healthier lives.
After conducting extensive patient and doctor surveys, as well as over a dozen user interviews, we learned that of those patients that were failing to follow their doctors orders after being discharged from the hospital, it was usually because they would misplace their paper work from the doctor. Some others would begin their treatment plans, but would slow and eventually stop after 7 days or less. In the interview process we also discovered that many of these patients wanted to follow their treatment plans and would even make steps to help them remember or encourage themselves, like creating daily calendar events or phone reminders. However, everyone eventually dismissed or turned off the events and reminders after several days, saying that they became annoying and easy to dismiss.
Our first solution was to create an AI chat bot that would simulate a health coach through text messages. At first, the AI bot would check-in multiple times each day, but then slowly decrease to once per day depending on the user’s engagement. This worked great for the first 10 days until we noticed a decline in user engagement. By 3 weeks, most users had completely stopped engaging with the AI bot.
Further user interviews revealed that users were getting annoyed with the bot reminding them and texting them so they would just opt-out or block the number. Many of the users expressed that they knew it was just a robot that was texting them so they didn’t feel bad about quitting it. This gave me the idea of building an app that had several different engagement features that would help them not just change their behavior, but to embrace and participate in a completely new life-style that involves managing their chronic illness or disease.
Ultimately, we created an app that not only included our AI bot, but also featured a social platform to connect and engage with other patients in your area with the same disease, an RSS feed that sent you articles of potential related interest, and a messaging feature to directly communicate with your primary care physician, as well as some other helpful features.
The end result discovered in our final round of user testing and interviews was a significant increase in daily engagement and a massive decrease in drop-off after 4 weeks of use.
