Designing New Tools for Equitable Healthcare Access

By Amrita Narasimhan, Annika Epperly, Katie Xinran Hancock, and Logan Milandin

Introduction to the Problem

Easy access to healthcare, medication, and other wellness resources should be available to anyone regardless of their health and ability. However, those with mobility impairments may struggle more than others to access these resources and advocate for the help they need. Barriers to access include problems like buildings without ramps to entrances and offices that don’t provide individualized accommodations for patients during appointments. Our project aims to examine these disparities and design a tool to help people with mobility-related disabilities take control of their healthcare and advocate for their accommodation needs.

Researching the Problem

We focused our user research towards gaining a better understanding of the challenges that people with mobility-related disabilities face in a medical setting. To do this, we asked participants to rate and optionally describe their experience completing a variety of common tasks that they might encounter throughout the course of a standard medical visit.

Our primary research method was through a survey of our target population, as it gave us valuable insights into our problem space and verified or denied various preconceptions we had regarding our problem. Additionally, we wanted to ensure participant privacy due to the nature of healthcare information, and a survey seemed like a great option to give participants the flexibility to provide only the information they were comfortable with in a more anonymous setting. In order to find participants, we posted our survey onto public subreddits for people with mobility-related disabilities and asked a few accessibility labs at our university to help us send out our survey . We allowed participants to remain anonymous while filling out our survey while also giving them the option of providing any amount of additional information they may desire to share. Due to this, the amount of background information we received for each participant was limited, but each participant had a disability that impacted their mobility. We ended up receiving responses from four participants.

Through our research, we received valuable information on the difficulty that people with mobility impairments have while completing standard tasks in a medical setting, such as filling out forms, navigating physical office spaces, getting transportation to the medical care center, and communicating needs to medical professionals. This was achieved by asking participants to rate each task on a numerical scale ranging from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy).

Since our participants had a wide variety of mobility impairments, we got a lot of variation in our responses. However, the most prevalent problems seemed to be filling out required forms and communicating needs to medical professionals, with 50% of our participants saying those were difficult tasks. One respondent, for example, had nerve damage in their hands and mentioned constant frustration with the redundancy of intake forms and the “invisibility” of their accommodation needs.

We also found out that filling out forms using digital means was only moderately difficult for participants as opposed to very difficult when using pen and paper, so this got us to start thinking about a digital solution, particularly one that would allow hands-free writing through speech-to-text technology.

Other tasks which seemed to be consistently difficult for participants were finding transportation to medical care centers and navigating physical office spaces. We expected this, but we decided that solving these problems is beyond the scope of what we hope to accomplish with our design; improving transportation requires extensive infrastructure development, and designing a mobility aid requires physiology expertise that none of us possess.

Designing a Solution

Even though our design research confirmed our preconceptions about a variety of difficult scenarios, we chose to focus on an interface to help with the specific tasks of filling out intake forms and communicating needs with medical professionals. These tasks are certainly solvable using the kind of technology we’re capable of designing. With this goal in mind, we began sketching out some forms that our interface might take. One of our ideas was a kind of kiosk that sits in a medical center and can be used to fill out forms without the need of pen and paper:

This idea had some merit, but we decided that it was too limiting to only have it present in medical offices. For the tasks we wanted to support, it’s often the case that a user would want to use the interface prior to an appointment, so we decided to move in the direction of a mobile app. For instance, consider the following scenario:

If the interface was only available when this user arrived at their appointment, then the doctor wouldn’t have time to prepare to meet their accommodation needs. Here’s the type of simple interface we’re going for with the app:

We have a simple home screen with a navigation bar at the bottom that contains four tabs (labeled 1–4 as seen in the images above) corresponding to four different functions.

The idea here is that the tab labeled as #1 takes the user to fill out intake forms. The medical office would have a way to send the digital form to the user, either before their appointment or when they check in, and it would autofill with as much pre-recorded information as possible to reduce the time and effort needed.

The second tab takes the user to a screen where they can filter nearby offices according to their accessibility ratings and features, such as wheelchair ramps or the lack thereof. This doesn’t necessarily support the two tasks we’re focusing on, but it would at least help people find an office they’d be able to access.

Tab #3 takes the user to a place where they can record or receive useful information from medical visits. Again, this doesn’t support the two tasks we’re focusing on, and mechanisms already exist for this, so we might drop the idea to reduce clutter.

Tab #4 takes the user to a screen to fill out their personal accommodation needs and any medical information that they want to auto-fill forms with. They would have an option to send this accommodation information to their doctor’s office along with a completed intake form.

All in all, we have only a rough idea of the app design itself. But we’re confident that a mobile app is the best way we can support people with mobility impairments in a medical context, and we have a pretty clear idea of the functionality we want the interface to have. We believe that a quality product like this would help to break down the barriers people with disabilities face in the medical industry and get them the care they deserve. Thanks for taking the time to read!