HealthBlocks:

Monitoring Wearables for Clinical Research

HealthBlocks Platform

Role: Design Lead: UX & UI

Collaborated with:
Technology Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine: Product owners, project managers, software engineers, designers, clinicians, researchers, data scientists, research coordinators
Microsoft: Software engineers, software architects, technical project leads

My Contribution: Employ user-centric strategy and problem-solving, conduct user and market research, facilitate co-design and brainstorming sessions, collaborate with product owner to develop a roadmap for the product, build and test wireframes and prototypes, work closely with developers during the implementation phase and hand-off.

Research Methods: User interviews, usability testing, surveys, service blueprints, personas, task flows.

Duration:
MVP Launch: December 2021
Phase 2: Launched in Fall 2023

HealthBlocks is a digital platform designed and developed by the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center (TIC) in partnership with Microsoft to provide a seamless and more automated onboarding experience for patients who are participating in medical trials. The centralized dashboard management tool helps research study coordinators increase their efficiency and follow-through.

Read more about this Project on TIC’s Website, or TIC’s Medium Page

The Problem

The traditional way of running clinical studies with medical wearables can be very time consuming and inefficient for both research study coordinators and participants. Currently coordinators need to use multiple platforms, spread sheets, etc. to keep track of participants’ activities. Also participants can get overwhelmed by the multiple steps they need to go through during the onboarding steps.

The Solution

The goal was to build an automated and seamless experience for participants and study teams. This platform has 2 applications:
1. A dashboard which is used by research coordinators to help them with monitoring participants’ activities through their medical wearables

2. A native mobile application for participants to facilitate their on boarding, connect them with study coordinators and display their participation progress.

HealthBlock’s minimal viable product (MVP) is compatible only with fitbit devices. But it will support multiple medical wearable devices such as spirometers, scales, glucose and blood pressure monitoring devices, etc. in the future phases.

Here are the 4 critical factors of HealthBlocks:

The dashboard empowers study coordinators to prioritize higher value tasks. Within the MVP, coordinators can create studies, add participants and set-up devices in one platform. Additionally, they have capability to generate and oversee notifications and reminders tailored to their preferred communication channel, while also monitoring their activities.

On the participant side, the mobile app provides a user friendly on boarding experience. Users have the ability to configure the preferred communication channel (SMS/email) directly within the app. Additionally, they can conveniently set up their medical wearables and access relevant information about their devices (only Fitbit for the MVP) from the HealthBlocks mobile app.

UX research

I started my discovery journey by conducting interviews (about 10 initial round of interviews) with 5 research coordinators from various departments at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. This helped me gain a better understanding of their process, pain points and needs. Learning more about the clinical study processes also helped with requirement gathering and prioritization of more necessary features for the MVP.

I used Dovetail for documenting and categorizing my interview notes and Miro for documenting my other research steps such as personas, service blue prints, user flows, etc and also collaborating with research coordinators to build task flows. Based on the interviews, I learned that the onboarding process is very inefficient. Coordinators use multiple platforms and tools to manage various aspects of their work. This results in time consuming tasks such as logging into each participant’s account daily to ensure compliance. I worked closely with 5 study coordinators to create task flows and a service blue print to better understand their workflow and identify opportunities for improvement.

After gathering requirements and brainstorming with engineers and technical leads on the logistics of the product, the wireframes for the dashboard and the mobile app were created and tested by coordinators to make sure they cover their fundamental requests and needs.
The goal was to build the MVP in about 4 months which would support only fitbit. It could automate some of the steps for coordinators and participants.

Below you can read more about some features of the this platform.

Participant List and Activity Tracker

One of the most important features of the Healthblocks dashboard is for the coordinators to see all participants’ activities in one page. So they wouldn’t need to log into separate accounts. They could easily recognize if someone was not compliant (syncing or wearing their Fitbit) in the past 24 hours.

In the image below you see the process of designing the participants list. Coordinators can easily identify participants who are non-compliant.

After several iterations and testing, I completed the high fidelity wireframes, incorporating the HealthBlocks branding.

Hi-Fi mockups for the participant list page. Clicking on each row would take users participant’s details page.

HealthBlocks native mobile app

There was also a native mobile app designed and built for participants to smoothing the onboarding experience. The MVP of this mobile app is built but is not available to the public. Users are able to log in by using theit MyChart credentials. (MyChart is the patient facing app for all patients at Johns Hopkins)

Some important features of this app is:

1. To let participants choose their preferred channel of communication

2. To display onboarding instructions and details about the studies they’re participating

3. Triggering “active” status on the coordinator’s dashboard

HealthBlocks is currently in the early stages of development and the MVP has been tested.
The next phase of this platform product is going to support multiple wearable devices and will include some overall improvements both on the dashboard and the mobile app.

LESSONS LEARNED

• Scalability is one of the most challenging problems to solve for this product. Each study team has specific requirements and sometimes these studies could recruit very large number of participants. It's challenging to make sure the user experience is still intuitive.

• Another challenge for study teams is to keep participants motivated and engaged. The rate of dropout increases after the first few months of a study.

• Patients would love to see how their contribution is used for medical studies. Learning more about how they are helping study teams at Johns Hopkins could be very encouraging.

Where is HealthBlocks now and what does the future look like?

HealthBlocks went through a rebranding and now it is known as “Wearable Labs”. The Technology Innovation Center has once again teamed up with Microsoft to develop and implement the next version and I am serving as the UX lead for this project.