UI/UX Designer
Eleos health patient portal
Introduction
Eleos health is a company aiming to transform the behavioral healthcare landscape by using voice A.I. to assist clinicians during their sessions with patients.
Description
The Eleos system listens to patients during therapy sessions and gives insights to the clinician based on the type and frequency of language used. Additionally, Eleos health employs the measurement-based care (MBC) approach to behavioral care and tracks responses to clinically validated measurements of mental health symptoms such as the PHQ-9 major depressive disorder questionnaire. As part of their system, Eleos wishes to create a patient portal in which the patient can access their MBC data, respond to questionnaires, and otherwise interact with their clinician.
Eleos approached our team with a request for a proposal that included the creation of such a portal. In the RFP, Eleos described a portal that consisted of five features: assessments and monitoring, worksheets, check-ins, journaling, and safety net. Through careful consideration, our team decided to propose a project centered on detailed research and execution of just the assessments and monitoring portion of the RFP. More details of our project scope can be found in the Challenges section below.
Our goals for the value we wanted to add to the clinical process with the Eleos Patient Portal came from the RFP, but were much more clearly defined once we came to a compromise with the product manager we worked with, Tal. Tal offered helpful clarity to Eleos’s priorities with the project and helped us define realistic goals to meet them given our time constraints.
Our primary goal that we defined with Tal, and further refined and shifted by the expert interviews we conducted, our user questionnaire, and expert reviews can be concisely defined as:
1. To encourage patient adherence with bi-weekly check-ins using the PHQ-9 by educating them about the importance and applicability of it to their mental health.
2. To elicit useful information about the patient’s mental health and progress of therapeutic interventions by supplementing the PHQ-9 questionnaire with meaningful journal entries completed by patients.
3. To help the patient in seeing their progress (or lack thereof, and need for change) by providing insight to their mental health status over time and its articulation in their journaling, to provide context to their emotional state in the context of time.
Defined by our goals, scoped by our time constraints, and refined by our research and expert interviews, our objectives can be described by the context of our app where we articulated the said goals.
In the user onboarding of the Eleos Patient Portal, our objective was to educate the patient on the utility of the PHQ-9 questionnaire and on its delivery in the app, on the usefulness and value gained with our journaling features, and on the articulation of the history stored in the app of the user’s mental health data and status.
The timing and frequency of notifications is essential to the success of our app. If notified too often or at the wrong time, users may assume a habit of dismissing reminders to complete their assessments, while not not notifying users enough or at the right time may lead us to missing an opportunity to keep them engaged and adherent. We tried to provide simple but complete control of when and how often our users are notified by presenting this setting immediately after the onboarding process and keeping it easily accessible to change the frequency or timing as desired.
For the PHQ-9 delivery in the app, our main objective was to make the flow as easy and user-friendly as possible, specifically those we identified in the existing paper version of the questionnaire in our research. By removing these barriers, we hoped that the supplemental features of our app would promote adherence to completing the questionnaire on a bi-weekly basis.
To provide supplemental context about the patient’s mental health status between visits to the clinician, we decided that journaling was essential. Here we again wanted to remove as many barriers as possible to engagement and adherence, but this time, that meant adding rather than subtracting. Additionally, given research into how prevalent journaling is in the mental health treatment field, this feature would provide another source of user engagement and keep people coming back to the Eleos Health app.
Our journaling feature offers prompts to help elicit meaningful input from patients who may not have any idea where to start, while also allowing the patient to jump right into a blank journal if there is something on the top of their mind.
We wanted to bring this all together with our Your Journey feature, which provides a look at the historical data collected by our app for the patient. Inspired by the words of our data-and-linguistic-minded expert, we approached this initially as a purely metaphorical experience. By linking established emotional connotations to imagary to the patient’s mental health status as defined by their PHQ-9 assessment, we wanted to allow the patient to “travel in time”, remembering and associating their status to journals (and other data collected by the app, but out of scope for our engagement) collected at the time.
Group Members
Sam Bruce, David Pindrys, Liheng Xu, Su Hnin Pwint
