Pharmacists should follow up on patients’ therapy compliance and monitor outcome to evaluate adherence, possible drug therapy problems, common adverse drug reactions and document results.

The productivity of Nigerian community pharmacists is grossly affected by workload fatigue and burnouts which makes it herculean for them to effectively follow patients up. Patients need to experience pharmaceutical care that places their health above their money, hence the need to find a means to increase pharmacists’ productivity.

Task:

Create a solution that allows pharmacists to follow up and monitor patients therapy easily.

Role: UX Research | UX Design | Wireframing | UI Design | Prototyping

Target: Community pharmacists in Nigeria.

INTRODUCTION

In Nigeria, patients bear the brunt of the heat from fatigued and overworked healthcare practitioners such as doctors, nurses, and pharmacists every day. This is mostly because of the short-staffed and unfurnished healthcare premises. It’ll only be unfair and unwise to lay a charge on someone obviously burning out in a bid to save your own life. It’s not always the question of qualification but the system at work.

It gets worse for a community pharmacist endowed with the responsibility of managing the business, men, materials, and methods in a pharmacy premise that is first profit-oriented. Most pharmacists suffer from work fatigue and burnouts daily as a result which significantly reduces productivity and the lauded pharmaceutical care practice.

Pharmaceutical care is a patient-oriented and outcome-focused pharmacy practice in which the pharmacist takes responsibility for a patient's drug-related needs, and is held accountable for this commitment.

Adding an effective patient follow-up and therapy adherence or compliance monitoring plan to the daily schedule of an already overworked pharmacist in Nigeria is quite impracticable.

I conducted a foundational UX research that combines management and pharmacists’ effort to solve this problem which builds up to designing this mobile APP with the goal of enhancing pharmacists’ productivity and facilitate patient therapy follow-up and monitoring [See full UX research documentation here].

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DESIGN RESEARCH

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 “if there must be a role for the pharmacist in the healing process, the adoption of technology in the practice is not an option. It is a must.” – Feranmi, A pharmacist. [Sources: https://punchng.com/the-future-of-pharmacy-in-nigeria/]

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USER RESEARCH

I carried out surveys and reviewed published articles, journals and research works to identify existing channels that pharmacists use to follow up on patients’ therapy compliance and outcome in countries and states where it is being practiced, benefits of this practice to business, and the pain points and hindrances to having done the same in community pharmacies in Nigeria. [see UX research documentation here] You'll be redirected to a Google doc.

My survey respondents (practicing pharmacists) highlighted the following hindrances and what could help them overcome it:

1. Time and Workload Constraints: Forgetting to follow-up most of the time possibly due to existing workload. Too many competing priorities in the pharmacy workplace. Proposed Solution: Reminder, Assistant & Management Support.
2. Priority-induced hindrances: Lack of pharmacist’s knowledge of the essence of patient’s follow-up and patient’s knowledge of pharmacist’s ability. Proposed Solution: Public enlightenment & keeping patients record

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So, why not use alarms, calendars, to-do list and reminder Apps in the market?

I assumed the reasons why these pharmacists could not just rely on existing alarms ,reminders and related APPs could be because of the following:

• Existing productivity apps are not designed to suit a profession making it difficult to separate work to-dos from personal to-dos.
• It is complex to organize notes and to-dos
• Regional ethical and legal stipulations as to the privacy and safety of patients’ data if kept on digital devices hackers.

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PERSONA

I sampled respondents and their responses and created this persona to simulate an imaginary pharmacist that fits most of the responses.

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PROPOSED DIGITAL SOLUTION - PharmNote

[See UX research documentation for proposed management solution]

An application (preferably mobile APP) that allows pharmacists to follow up and monitor patients therapy easily and set patient-specific to-dos/follow-up questions (something like a checklist of things to follow up patients on), custom remind patients of refills and allow pharmacists to learn or follow audio events/podcasts around them to promote enlightenment of pharmaceutical care practices.

I came up with a mobile App concept called PharmNote, with functionalities that enhances and speeds up follow-up processes and key features like:

• Templates for scribbling and taking full patient case notes (SOAP, FARM format)
• Patient-specific reminders.
• Template of follow-up questions checklist
• Patient category sorting/tagging e.g. First time buyers, repeat-buyers
• Allow collaboration with other practitioners
• Auto send reminder text messages 1-2times to patients or patients guardian for prescription refills
• To allow voice notetaking(voice-to-text function)
• Hide patient’s ID, reveal initials only.
• Allow live podcast and audio event hosting: to encourage #pharmacy-practice-talks, etc.

FEATURES TO ENSURE PATIENT PRIVACY AND DATA SECURITY

• The use of passkey protected digital/electronic signatures on case notes and required to collaborate or share patient’s data with other practitioners.
• Automatically appends Digital signature to case notes and follow up notes.
• Patient’s consent and agreement before collaboration or sharing data with other practitioners.
• Both the pharmacist managing patient and recipient practitioner/pharmacist must be registered on platform before collaboration and sharing of data.

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DESIGN GOALS

Voice: Conversational (like a personal assistant)

User Interface: Simple, intuitive, less-sophisticated, easy navigation

COMPETITOR RESEARCH

I used versus.com to compare popular notetaking APPs to learn their unique features and functionalities. I also studied the intuitiveness of their different user interfaces.

Taking note of the conventional features (i.e., features common to most), I ensured to include them in my product also to ensure users don’t face the problem of learning a new feature.

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Ideate

USER FLOW

I created user flow charts to concisely illustrate the steps a user takes to perform certain tasks within the APP. I kept improving on these flows throughout the process of creating this product to ensure they are minimal, short, and less cumbersome. The user actions illustrated are:

• Note creation
• Note sharing
• Public paid and free consultation

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PAPER WIREFRAME

I sketched some of the main App screens on paper to document my mental picture of the App as I visualized from my research on the interface of other existing notetaking Apps.

I then replicated these paper sketches on Figma to allow easy access and communication with third parties. I made low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes of the product interface on Figma. [Click here to see all wireframes]

HIGH FIDELITY WIREFRAME

In a bid to present this product for review by a practicing pharmacist with no design knowledge, I created most of the screens in high fidelity wireframe explaining the spec and features of the App as shown below:

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Visual Design