While healthcare providers in the U.S. struggle with design challenges of electronic medical record systems, some other countries are still struggling to get basic paper records systems in place.
A global healthcare design challenge funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation tasked designers with giving the children’s immunization record a makeover.
Immunization programs are put at risk when records don’t effectively keep an accurate history of a child’s health or identify when a child is off schedule, which is the case in many developing countries, according to the foundation.
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Through focus groups conducted by the Center of Knowledge Societies in Kenya, Indonesia and India, the foundation saw a few big problems emerge: Illiteracy among parents caused challenges with linking children to the right record; most records had no obvious way to highlight that vaccines had been missed; and records were missing a predominant “date of next visit” slot.
More than 300 teams from 41 countries proposed ideas to make records clearer and more flexible as part of the Records for Life contest. I missed the news when the winners were announced last month, but it’s still worth drawing attention to their ideas now. I noticed that a lot of the design principles here run parallel with desirable qualities of electronic personal health records: Make them fun, make them simple, make them flexible and make them personal.
The grand prize winners designed a vaccine record booklet that slips into a hangable sleeve with the child’s name and picture on it. A tab indicating the date of a child’s next visit sticks out of the top of the booklet as an obvious reminder.
A team from Chicago-based innovation consultancy gravitytank developed the winning record and included a set of illustrative health education cards along with it. See an in-depth look at their design here.
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A project that earned an honorable mention turned the record into something more personal for families by putting it into a picture book-type casing, with a photograph of the child on the front.
A team at the Maryland Institute College of Art took a similar approach, making the record look more like a timeline.
You can see the ideas from the rest of the finalists here.
[Images from the Gates Foundation]