Helping patients report their wellbeing accurately through electronic clinical assessment widgets

Objective

Creating an industry standard for how patients who are going through clinical trials, can report their health status to their doctors.

Purpose

eCOA (electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments) are tools used in clinical studies to capture patient data digitally. They replace paper-based assessments to improve data accuracy, patient compliance, and streamline data collection. Good eCOA design enhances user experience, ensuring ease of use for diverse patient groups, and supports better data collection. They can lead to faster, more reliable clinical trial data, potentially speeding up new treatments' approval processes.

Design

I was a part of the questionnaire squad as the product designer. I worked with developers, senior scientists, eCOA copyright holders to ensure that the widgets we ship, meet regulatory approval while also catering for ease of use, accessibility and delight. I owned the design process from the start to finish until documentation with accessibility pointers to development team.

Challenge

I learned to design with tools that directly supported my vision because I believe that ideas can restricted by the medium. I used interactive prototypes built on protopie and swift UI code to communicate the emotional aspects of these widgets when patients use them; how it makes them feel, how they behave and most importantly not to bias them as it could affect clinical trials. These can be overlooked and affordances could be missed in traditional static screen designs.

Results

We did two rounds of usability testing and one round of equivalency testing with 7 participants in each study. A combined average of 94% of participants who had some sort of visual or dexterity impairment were able to use the widgets and scales effectively without any help. Currently, the widgets are live on multiple studies across the world and we are able to gather much higher quality of data while delighting patient experience.