Haynes David, Cheng Pengxu, Weaver Megan, Parsons Helen, Karaca-Mandic Pinar
Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
XanthosHealth, Minneapolis, MN.
Appl Clin Inform. 2025 Jan;16(1):67-76. doi: 10.1055/a-2425-8731. Epub 2024 Oct 3.
Health Information Technology is increasingly being used to help providers connect patients with community resources to meet health-related social needs (e.g., food, housing, transportation). Research is needed to design efficient, simple, and engaging interfaces during a sensitive process that involves multiple stakeholders. Research is also needed to understand the roles, expectations, barriers, and facilitators these different stakeholders (i.e., patients, providers, and community-based organizations [CBOs]) face during this process.
We applied the human-centered design approach to develop a multi-interface social care referral platform. This approach allowed us to understand the needs of each stakeholder and address potential workflow concerns.
This paper reports on the research team's understanding of the design process from 48 different user tests. We conducted three rounds of user testing on an interactive prototype(s) and adapted the prototype after each round.
Our results summarize several key findings useful for patients, clinical teams, and staff of CBOs when designing a social care referral platform. Our user testing highlighted that patient-facing interfaces offer tremendous opportunities to allow patients to be the leader of the social care referral process. CBOs have varying needs that must be addressed, and providing CBO staff with opportunities to connect with patients is critical. Finally, health care teams have more structured workflows. Integration within the electronic health record system provides opportunities for health care staff to support their patients more easily given these barriers.
Our resulting, patient-centered platform allows patients to self-screen and self-refer to organizations that match their unmet needs.
健康信息技术正越来越多地用于帮助医疗服务提供者将患者与社区资源相连接，以满足与健康相关的社会需求（如食品、住房、交通）。在这个涉及多个利益相关者的敏感过程中，需要开展研究来设计高效、简单且吸引人的界面。还需要进行研究，以了解这些不同利益相关者（即患者、医疗服务提供者和社区组织[CBOs]）在此过程中所面临的角色、期望、障碍和促进因素。
我们应用以人为本的设计方法来开发一个多界面社会护理转诊平台。这种方法使我们能够了解每个利益相关者的需求，并解决潜在的工作流程问题。
本文报告了研究团队从48次不同用户测试中对设计过程的理解。我们在一个交互式原型上进行了三轮用户测试，并在每一轮后对原型进行调整。
我们的结果总结了几个关键发现，这些发现在设计社会护理转诊平台时对患者、临床团队和社区组织工作人员很有用。我们的用户测试强调，面向患者的界面为让患者成为社会护理转诊过程的主导者提供了巨大机会。社区组织有不同的需求必须得到满足，为社区组织工作人员提供与患者建立联系的机会至关重要。最后，医疗团队有更结构化的工作流程。鉴于这些障碍，在电子健康记录系统中进行整合为医护人员更轻松地支持患者提供了机会。
我们最终形成的以患者为中心的平台使患者能够自我筛查并自我转诊至符合其未满足需求的组织。
