Designing to Succeed

The finalists for this year’s Most Valuable Patient Initiative or Service at the 2016 eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards showcase the potential for impact when patients become collaborators in design. Understanding the human aspects of living with a condition is in many ways less straightforward than drug development. Everyone experiences their health challenges differently, and it’s clear this can’t be designed for in a lab. That’s why collaborating with the patient brings benefits. Here are three lessons we learned from this year’s crop of patient innovators:  1. Ongoing engagement with the patient makes iterative design possible, ideal for mHealth projects, where it is relatively easy to deploy updates through app store and Google Play. Merck deployed this strategy to great effect in the product development of their app ‘Second Voice’, an inspiring use of tech to help patients with difficulty speaking. Patients can use the app to quickly draw on over 130 pre-programmed messages, including dedicated messages to communicate pain, or they are even able to add their own. By listening to patient needs and designing a tool that helps in both a clinical and home setting, Merck have created a tool that really resonates with patients; it has hit 2,500 downloads in just two months.  In a similar vein, the team behind Roche’s diabetes app, Gluci-Chek, which quickly analyses the carbohydrate intake of meals, paneled patients online to ask them which features would best ...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news