Designing a Mission statement Mobile app for palliative care: an innovation project utilizing design-thinking methodolog
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Designing a Mission statement Mobile app for palliative care: an innovation project utilizing design-thinking methodology Rakhshan Kamran1*
and Arianna Dal Cin2
Abstract Background: Eliciting individual values and preferences of patients is essential to delivering high quality palliative care and ensuring patient-centered advance care planning. Despite advance care planning conserving healthcare costs by up to 36%, reducing psychological distress of patients and caregivers, and ensuring palliative care delivery in line with patient wishes, less than 33% of adults engage in it. We aimed to develop a mobile application intervention to address the challenges related to advance care planning and improve the delivery of palliative care. Methods: Design-thinking methodology was used to develop a mobile application, in response to issues prominently identified in current palliative care literature. Results: Issues surrounding communication of patient values from both the patient and provider side is identified as a main issue in palliative care. We designed a mobile application intervention prototype to address this. Conclusions: Our “Mission Statement” mobile application will allow patients to create a mission statement identifying what they want their care team to know about them, as well as space to identify important values and preferences. Patients will be able to evolve their mission statement and values and preferences over the course of their palliative care journey through the application. Design-thinking methodology is an effective tool to drive healthcare innovation and bridge the gap between research findings and implementation. Keywords: Palliative care, Advance care planning, Design-thinking, Technology, App
Background Palliative care is a dynamic, interdisciplinary, and highly personalized process [1]. It aims to not hasten or delay death, rather, focus on pain and symptom management, improve quality of life, and emotional and spiritual care [1]. Palliative care also involves advance care planning, which includes reflection on one’s values and beliefs and then communicating them with healthcare providers and family members [2–4]. The benefits of advance care planning are well documented. Advance care planning * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, MDCL 3114, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4 K1, Canada Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
allows patients to receive care which is in line with their values and preferences [5, 6], allows caregivers and family members of patients to have reduced psychological distress over being a surrogate decision maker and interpreting unknown or ambiguous patient wishes [7, 8], and conserves healthcare costs by up to 36% [9, 10]. Many guidelines also report on the importance of honest and compassionate communication in end-of-life care being essential for patient-centeredness [11–13]. Despite these benefits, less than 33% of ad
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