Elsevier - Educating patients on their way home from the hospital

Hospital staff are federally required to provide patients with educational information before discharging them from the hospital. The problem is that patients have significant barriers to retaining information during this time — because of stress and often from being in a drug-induced state. For this reason, they rely on their caregivers to learn what they need to know. Elsevier is working to bridge the gap among multiple end-users by providing accessible patient education that meets the federal requirements, and that can also be accessed at home.

We began by interviewing hospital nursing staff about the many hoops they often jump through to make sure patients receive the education they need before leaving the hospital. We also learned about the complexity of their technical ecosystem at work. We created a customer journey map to clarify points of friction for the various audience profiles.

In the design phase, in order to streamline procedures for nurses, we developed an interface where nurses can assign patient education from environments they were already using. We also developed a patient education interface that can be accessed by multiple user profiles (patients and caregivers), from multiple devices and locations. A click-through prototype was provided to the Elsevier team to begin development.