OPcheck – Neutral Second Opinions
OPcheck is a project that provides medical second opinions on a strictly neutral basis. OPcheck connects patients who need to undergo a surgery with Swiss physicians. Second opinions are becoming more and more important due to the fact that many patients are overwhelmed by the mass of medical information, feel pressed into surgeries and are unsure which way to choose for themselves. OPcheck provides the contact to a doctor, who is a specialist in the field with the opportunity to have a face-to-face discussion with the doctor.
The project OPcheck was developed after a personal experience where my husband found himself pressed to undergo an unwanted and unnecessary surgery after an accident. He knew the specialist to talk to. Our aim is to provide this knowledge to everyone in order to prevent unnecessary pain and consequences of surgeries. General cost reduction in medicine is an issue here too.
I did the whole product and business development from scratch. The IT parts of requirements engineering and interaction design where part of a master thesis in Human Computer Interaction Design (MASHCID) at the Technical University of Rapperswil.
Business Development
The business of OPcheck is created with a lean and agile approach. We developed the MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and published it to opcheck.ch in order to test the workflow and to get sustainable feedback from our users. The service will be improved on a step-by-step basis throughout the next months. New iterations will be developed and published soon.
Requirements Engineering
During requirements engineering we focussed on gaining domain knowledge as well as learning as much as possible about our users. The process started with an extensive desk-research about competitors and their best practices. Then we went on with extensive user evaluation by qualitative and quantitative methods in order to get as much data as possible for our personas.
The possible workflow was created by flow-charts. All use cases were identified, prioritized and documented in a requirements list. Scenarios helped us to describe the needs of the users.
Project Details
Customer
OPcheck, T-Stiftung
Methods
Interviews, Workshops
Usecases
Market evaluation
Qualitative and quantitative surveys
Flow-charts
Requirements list
Scenarios
Interaction Design
The design phase was determined by the approach to model all gained knowledge into the best possible workflow for our users. We focussed upon the interface for patients. It is crucial to develop a web interface for people who are not medical professionals but need to deal with a lot of medical and personal information. The challenge is to collect the medical facts for a person in order to deliver them to a high professional. This was one of the main reasons why we decided to offer real interviews with doctors instead of online second opinions where patients are not intended to meet their doctors even once.
We developed and refined prototypes through several iterations. Each prototype was tested with a group of patients with a cognitive-walkthrough followed by an interview. The technical level of the prototypes was raised by every iteration carried out.
Project Details
Customer
OPcheck, T-Stiftung
Methods
Scribbles
Affinity Diagrams
Personas
User-evaluation (tests, interviews)
Prototyping (paper-prototypes, interactive HTML prototypes)
ISO 9241-210