Patient-reported mental health data
Hackathon project, Quartet Health 2020
Product Designer
Background: This was a 2 day Hackathon project in the fall of 2020. My team consisted of 4 engineers, 1 product manager and myself. The original was just to import wearable data into the patient app. We evolved it to be more cohesive so it became more of a mental health tracking app that also reads the data back to the patient’s therapist.
Goal: Create an MVP of a patient data tracking app that collects healthkit information as well as mood and goal tracking. Reflect this data back to their therapist in a weekly patient summary in the MHP (mental healthcare professional) app.
Prototype link: Invision prototype
Background & Problem Definition
Quartet hosted a 2 day Hackathon for anyone interested in the company. There was one project idea around linking healthkit or wearable data with the patient app because there is a correlation between certain metrics and mental health.
For example, if a bipolar patient were to track their sleep, they might be able to better anticipate a manic or depressive episode. Taking more steps in a day can help with both anxiety and depression.
So this project was started with that vague concept in mind. After getting together as a team and brainstorming, we began to develop a holistic definition of what we actually wanted to solve and accomplish.
Since I usually work on the provider side of the product, I saw how useful patient data could be for a provider. So we talked about how this patient collected data would also be reflected in the MHP (mental healthcare professional) app.
We also wanted to expand to include more mental health specific data to collect and report back to the provider. We decided a mood and feeling tracker would be interesting to include. From interviews with patients and providers, we have learned that mental healthcare progress often comes from having a shared goal for therapy and progress is tracked against that goal. This background information we had, informed our decision to include a very bare-bones goal tracker as well.
Goal
Create an MVP of a patient data tracking app that collects healthkit information as well as mood and goal tracking. Reflect this data back to their therapist in a weekly patient summary in the MHP (mental healthcare professional) app.
How might we…
Utilize our patient app to get patient data related to mental healthcare to facilitate the care journey for patients and their therapists.
Solution Discovery & Definition
Deciding on metrics for healthkit
Engineering completed a review of what was accessible for us to pull into the patient app. We decided to go with the 3 most valuable since this was a hackathon. Those three metrics were sleep, steps and mindfulness minutes.
All of these have research-backed correlations to mental health. They are also mostly available without a wearable device and just through iPhone use.
Goal Tracker
We know from previous user research that providers use progress against a patient’s goal to track their outcomes.
Seeing how useful this information can be for providers, we decided to include a very lightweight goal tracker. To keep it low lift, I designed just an empty text field to create the goal, and after a goal is created, the patient can mark their progress on it. The goal and the state of progress would get relayed back to the provider. This ideally would help align the patient and provider on the goal, and also how the patient feels they are progressing on it.
Mood tracker research
I did some comparative research on other apps mood trackers to take inspiration from. Calm and headpsace were two of the most influential. Both use an illustrative, lightweight design approach to make the product feel friendly. Calm also has an emotion tracker using emojis that I took influence from.
I decided I wanted to include both a mood rating and an emotions tracker. A momentary mood rating might not encompass all the emotions this person felt throughout the day, and I wanted a way for the patient or therapist to say “I/You felt angry 5 times this week”.
After some very high level research into what moods to include, I learned there are 6 basic human emotions. I included those, and 3 others to get what I felt like was a bare bone representation of human emotion in relation to a person’s mental health.
Patient App Designs
Link to the prototype: Patient tracking Hackathon MVP
Home screen
This screen has both the mood tracker and the summary information available.
I opted to make the mood tracker the home page because it is the page that would need to be interacted with the most. Goals are typically more long term and healthkit data is collected automatically.
The emoji changes as you drag it across the feeling scale which has 10 options.
The emotions I selected came from some high level research around basic human emotions and also what was offered on the calm app.
Create a Goal
This page is a very simplified, MVP style way of allowing a user to create a goal and track it.
Once they save the goal, they see the screen to the right —>
Health Screen
This surfaces a weekly summary of the three basic healthkit data points we decided to collect, sleep, steps and mindfulness minutes.
I included an informational note at the top to explain why we would collect it and how it can be useful.
Track your goal
Once the patient has created a goal, it is highlighted at the top and we give them 4 options to select their progress with the goal.
Again, a very MVP version of a goal tracker.
MHP App Designs
Client Summary Tab
In the MHP app, a therapist can navigate to a specific patient’s page to see their historical care events, basic information, and referring provider. We added a new tab to report the summary of the patient-reported data collected. This decision was made partially for hackathon purposes to not mess with the “Client Info” tab.
This page shows a weekly summary of mood, emotions felt, average hours slept/night, average steps taken/day, and total mindfulness minutes. It also has the goal created by the patient and the patient reported progress listed below it.
Ideally, this would be used by the therapist to get a better understanding of how their patient has been beyond the one hour a week they see each other.
Outcome & Future State ideas
Engineering surprisingly built this in 2 days!
It was a very collaborative, in-the-moment process which made it easier to go faster. I would push out a page at a time or a rough state first to get them started and then update them with tweaks along the way.
Also, we won the “Most Complete” Hackathon award! We got custom mugs for our accomplishment.
If I got the opportunity to iterate on this further, I would love to expand out the goal tracking functionality accompanied with some user research on how to patients or providers want goals structured and tracked.
I would also love to flesh out the space in the MHP app a little bit better. Ideally, MHPs could see more than just one week of metrics or scroll throughout time. It would be great to pair this with any assessment results stored in app too.
I would want to tie this into the task dashboard as well so that MHPs are reminded to look at this data prior to an upcoming appointment.
Most importantly, I would want to show this to users and get some actual feedback on how they would use it or what else they would want to see here.
