Health Care Stories
Minnesota Community Measurement
CASE STUDY: The D5
CHALLENGE: Minnesota Community Measurement (MNCM) thrives on the mission to accelerate the improvement of health by publicly reporting health care information. MNCM needed help in order to continue achieving this mission and avoid the impracticalities associated with reinventing the entire MNCM report online.
WOWZA SOLUTION: Wowza recommended that MNCM focus on exploring the novel approaches to increasing consumer engagement with a single measure. Therefore, Phase One of Wowza's first project with MNCM was to build a small micro-Web site - www.theD5.org - that would report only one measure: Diabetes.
While the purpose of the Web site was to report clinic-level diabetes measures in a way that is simple to navigate and easy to understand, Wowza recognized that the real opportunity was in branding the measure. In giving the measure a name and a logo--the D5--it became easier for patients to understand the data and for providers and employers to communicate the treatment goals.
During the second phase of the D5, with funding from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, Wowza conducted focus groups with type-2 diabetes patients to inform the development of an integrated D5 marketing communications campaign. Based on the qualitative research, Wowza created a suite of communications tools, including rooming posters, appointment reminder post cards, a notebook to track exercise and food intake, and a physician prescription pad, to help spread awareness of the D5 treatment goals and foster dialogue between patients and providers.
In an effort to make it easy for educators, health care providers and employers to access, customize and use the D5 communications materials to inform patients about optimal diabetes care, Wowza also designed and developed an interactive catalog Web site.
In addition to creating external communications tools, Wowza expanded the D5 Web site by adding engaging consumer-centered content. On the new D5 site, consumers can become engaged in several ways: they can search the clinic-level data, watch videos, find recipes, or play with the simple and fun flash tools.
Healthy Memphis Common Table
CASE STUDY: HealthyMemphis.org
CHALLENGE: The Healthy Memphis Common Table (HMCT), a non-profit regional health and healthcare improvement collaborative for the greater Memphis area, needed a fresh and attractive Web site to engage a diverse group of stakeholders (including consumers, physicians, hospitals, employers and insurers) around health care quality measures. In order to accomplish such tasks, a newly designed HMCT Web site required:
WOWZA SOLUTION: The Wowza team and Healthy Memphis Common Table collaborative worked together to create solutions for engaging consumers in complex health care quality data as a tool for improving healthy lifestyles. Wowza developed a new brand image with a fresh logo and bright color palette to improve consumer appeal. Wowza branded the site around the organizationÕs overall communications campaign of ÒTake Charge for Better Health.Ó To further encourage consumer engagement, Wowza created a tool for generating printable customized lists of questions for doctors to help individuals better prepare for medical appointments. A consumer-friendly display was developed for reporting Medicare data on the health care quality ratings of local medical providers and patient ratings on personal experiences with local doctors. The key ideas behind WowzaÕs solutions include:
RESULTS: Since the successful launch of the new site, www.wacommunitycheckup.org, Wowza continues to add data and user functionality.
Puget Sound Health Alliance
CASE STUDY: WA Community Checkup
CHALLENGE: Like many communities across the country, Puget Sound Health Alliance (PSHA) was reporting Washington's health care quality measures as a PDF download. Not only did this make it difficult for consumers and health care providers to understand the data, but it was also challenging to update the data and add new measures. PSHA was also under pressure to complete the site in a short time frame, due to a previous vendor being unable to complete the project.
WOWZA SOLUTION: Working closely with Puget Sound Health Alliance to develop a comprehensive public reporting site, Wowza designed the database architecture and user interface to report clinic, hospital and medical group quality data for eight different categories, as well as resources for patients, employers and providers.
RESULTS: Since the successful launch of the new site, www.wacommunitycheckup.org, Wowza continues to add data and user functionality.
CAHPS III Reports Team
CASE STUDY: Select MD
CHALLENGE: The majority of privately run Web sites that compare physicians rely on consumer-generated comments as the primary data to aid in decision-making. However, health care quality organizations that report clinic and hospital data don't typically include patient comments; instead, they report unfamiliar statistical data, such as clinical measures or CAHPS, which can be more difficult to understand and can present cognitive challenges for consumers.
WOWZA SOLUTION: In early 2008, Wowza joined the CAHPS III reports team to help design and build an experimental Web site to study how consumers use different kinds of information to make health care decisions. The team - comprised of researchers from Yale University, the RAND Corporation, Westat and several expert quality consultants - worked with Wowza to create a mock physician comparison Web site to collect data on how consumers use web-delivered information to select a doctor.
Creating the experimental data-driven site posed many challenges. First, we needed to create a brand identity, including a name, logo and colors for the Web site. Not only was the identity required to be authentic and trustworthy, so users will believe that the site is real, but the identity couldn't have a strong brand personality, or the branding may interfere with the experiment. Likewise, the site needed to have all the modal functions a user would expect to find on a similar Web site, and all of the data had to be weighed as evenly as possible, so as not to create a bias. Web usability is also critical because if users have problems using the site, the experimental data will be deemed unreliable.
The actions for each user are recorded and timed, and all the data is passed along to the research team in order to analyze each of the experimental arms.
RESULTS: When the findings of the experiment are available, the results should prove helpful in guiding the development of consumer-friendly, interactive health care quality data reports.