Insights:

We think it is very important to consider the needs of everyone impacted by the registration process. It’s definitely important to work together with them in making changes, and getting their view and opinions. Insights from a larger group of people with different stakes, could also help better identify underlying problems and finding new solutions. Solving root issues might be hard because some of them might be out of our control or scope, like the process of proving one’s identity via Online-ID or Post-Ident, but is still very important because it can lead to large improvements. First solutions are never perfect so it is important to continuously test and refine with everyone involved.

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?

We would like to make the registration and activation process for the DAK ePA app simpler and more intuitive. We also want the user to understand the steps he is taking, instead of blindly tapping next.

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful?

The registration process is the first contact a user has with the app. If it’s a complicated process, the user might be discouraged from using the app altogether. Making this process simpler will allow more, less technologically literate people to use the app. These people might also need help and a simpler app is quicker to explain.

Who are your intended stakeholders?

Anyone who needs to register. Those who are interested in wide adoption for efficiency reasons, and quality of care like health insurers, doctors, politicians, care workers, …, developers who want user satisfaction, paramedics needing emergency information, people who have to set up the app for others, hackers looking to find data, people waiting for organ donation, employers, and many others.

Where is your user group interacting with your software?

Visiting the doctor, in medical emergencies, in hospitals, at border crossings, at home, care homes

When is the user group interacting with your software?

Getting diagnosed, getting vaccinated, getting treated, proving vaccination, going to the doctor, checking medication, not being able to go to work, going abroad, proving prescriptions

Who contributed what?

We collected insights and answered the question together. Niklas documented the signup process.

What have we learnt?

There are many many stakeholders involved.

What went well?

Teamwork

What can be improved upon?

It is tiring working when not fully healthy.

Teamname: register

Insights:

The ePA soon being an opt-out option, it will become something almost everyone uses in the near future. Considering the wide use the accompanying apps are intended for, it is a big problem most of them have atrocious reviews. Access to the app and thereby the data in one’s ePA is an integral part in building patients’ trust in the ePA by facilitating transparency. Trust is important to improve adoption of the ePA, as it comes with many benefits to patients, doctors and insurance companies. In our project we will focus on the DAK’s implementation of the ePA. We got quick access to it as it allows verifying identity via Post-Ident, which allows for Online-IDs, instead of verification by letter.

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?

The registration and activation process for the DAK ePA, although possible to complete entirely online, is quite long and not particularly intuitive. The user is sent back and forth between two apps, web apps and eMails. In our project we will focus on simplifying it and making it a more intuitive process, providing a clear flow for the user.

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful?

The registration process is the first contact a user has with the app. If it’s a complicated process, the user might be discouraged from using the app altogether. Making this process simpler will allow more, less technologically literate people to use the app.

Who are the intended stakeholder?

Anyone planning on using the app who has not gone through the registration process yet, as well as those who have interest in a wide adoption of the ePA e.g. Doctors and the DAK, would benefit from improvements in the registration process.

Who contributed what?

We collected insights and answered the question together. Niklas signed up for the DAK ePA, Alfred signed up for the TK ePA.

What have we learnt?

The existing apps for the ePA are mostly quite bad. Documenting privacy focused apps is hard as they don’t allow for screenshots.

What went well?

It was quite easy finding things that can be improved.

What can be improved upon?

Our time management did not leave any time to spare. The team name.

Teilaufgabe 1: uns ist noch kein Teamname eingefallen 🙁

Teilaufgabe 3: The electronic patient record (ePA) and digital health applications (DiGA) are two digital health initiatives in Germany. The ePA is a digital health record that allows patients to store and share their medical data with their healthcare providers. Patients can use the ePA to manage their medication, access test results, and view their vaccination records. The DiGA is a digital health application that is designed to improve patient health outcomes and are eligible for reimbursement by German health insurance companies. DiGAs can be used to support the treatment of chronic diseases, mental health issues, and other conditions. They can also help patients manage their health and wellbeing through various digital tools, such as tracking their symptoms, providing educational content, and enabling telemedicine consultations. Overall, both ePA and DiGA aim to improve patient care and outcomes in Germany. While ePA focuses on the storage and sharing of medical records, DiGA offers a range of digital tools to support the treatment and management of various health conditions.

Teilaufgabe 4: We decided to do our prject on the DiGA: Smoke Free

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?
The Dashboard is overwhelming and overall the app seems to have a lot of functionality that is not explained. We would like to introduce an instruction/tutorial to guide new users through the functionality the app provides.

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful?
we want to make the user experience for the app better, so that people use it for a longer time and reach their goal to stop smoking.

Who are your intended stakeholders?
smokers, health institutions, maybe doctors,

Reflexion:

Wer hat welchen Beitrag geleistet? All of us did the research for Task 3 and searched for a fitting DiGA. Anna and Alexandra wrote the blog entry. Henry found the DiGA we want to use,

Was habt ihr gelernt? We improved our knowledge about ePA and DiGA. We learned how to write this blogentry 🙂

Was lief gut? We had a good process to decide on a DiGa for the project

Was möchtet ihr verbessern? We want to improve our communtcation skills, so we can work better together.

Group name

„Make ePA work again“

Insights

We looked into the ePA applications of our health insurance companies. One of the applications did not work at all (screenshot below).

For the other application the registration process turned out to be quite complicated, as we were presented with the options to either receive a physical letter with a one time sign in code or a authentication by state issued ID. We decided to go for the latter.

As the authentication self was outsourced to a secondary company we were required to install another app and pass a set of privacy statements. In the end the registration worked, but the ePA could not be used as it required an higher android version.

We also found a desktop application with a dedicated demo mode, which we can use for our first analysis. We already encountered some problems like bugs with this demo mode.

In general, our first impression is that, on the one hand, the technical implementation of the applications is immature or not functional at all, and on the other hand, the registration process is too complicated for a large part of the presumed target group.

W-Questions

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?

We want to improve the general experience for users with using the applications. Therefore we want to evaluate the application from a user-centric point of view to analyze the challenges and problems users have to face when using it

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful? Why is that an interesting problem?

An evaluation of an application from an user-centric point of view with various scientific methods from the field of HCI will hopefully lead to an measurable improvement of its usability for the target group.

Who are your intended stakeholders? And who might be the indirect stakeholders?

As we are trying to improve the user interface and general user experience, the direct stakeholders would be the users of the applications. The applications developers can be considered as indirect stakeholders. Therefore our work might have an impact on their part.

Reflexion

We both did some research on our own and then came together to discuss our findings and write this blog post. We learned that the ePA applications deliver a bad user experience across different platforms/providers or do not work at all. We were a little confused about the specifics of the assignment and the use of the provided tools. We were not quite sure how the assignment had to be handed in.

Choose a team name

Die Vergessenen

Dive into the material provided on the „ePA“ and „DiGA“ and summarize your insights with a short description (about 150 words)

The ePA is an electronic patient record designed to provide patients with German health insurance with a secure and easily accessible storage system for their health-related data. With the ePA, patients can give healthcare professionals access to important information such as their medical history and medication plan. The sovereignty over the ePA lies with the user. They decide which third parties may access the ePA and the documents it contains. Patients can also share their ePA with their healthcare providers, which can improve communication and collaboration between doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers. The ePA also provides a list of all the DiGAs the patient has access to.

DiGAs, on the other hand, are digital health apps that patients can use to manage their health, such as recording symptoms in a diary (such as endometriosis symptoms in the Endo app). These apps are designed to empower patients to understand health contexts and gain health knowledge, take control of their health, and improve their quality of life. They are intended to supplement traditional medical treatment.

Please answer the following questions (first part of the Five Ws)

What is the challenge you would like to tackle? For example, the registration process is challenging, the privacy policy is not well explained, and the utility of the app is not transparent.

The difficulty of the registration process depends greatly on the health insurance company. Some health insurance companies only require a code for registration, which is provided by the health insurance app. For other health insurance companies, registration takes a few days through the Post-Ident process and the PIN letter, which is then delivered by post. Despite the major differences, registration is straightforward overall.

Once in the ePA the user always has the option to manage the patient record, such as look up who has access to the users data, withdrawal of consent or even to cancel the patient record.

Data protection issues may be more exciting. For example, TK’s privacy policy is very long. Copying the entire text results in a 27-page document. Probably few patients will read through it, certainly not on a smartphone. One possible focus of the project could be to explain the privacy policy in a more understandable and user-friendly way.

Security issues could also be of interest. Health-related data are highly sensitive and could be misused for malicious purposes if they fall into the wrong hands. One could investigate possible security vulnerabilities.

One could also compare the utility of the apps of the different health insurance companies in order to give users recommendations as well as health insurance companies suggestions for improvement. In addition to that, we might also take a look at the usability, like how UI and UX come together. 

Or one could tackle the problem of increasing adoption and awareness of digital health tools. Since more and more healthcare services move online this is an urgent problem that needs to be tackled.

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful? Why is that an interesting problem?

Data protection and security of health data are an urgent issue. It is essential to ensure that patients‘ rights are protected. The user-friendliness of these apps should be optimized to encourage their adoption.

Who are your intended stakeholders? And who might be the indirect stakeholders? For example, elderlies, parents, people with a certain illness, etc.

The intended stakeholders are patients and healthcare professionals, as they are the main users of these technologies. Another stakeholder would be the healthcare organization as they need to be aware of the problems, so that they can tackle them to make everything more mainstream.

Indirect stakeholders may include insurers, researchers, and policymakers who can use the data generated by ePAs and DiGas to make decisions regarding health policies like determining where research funds might go.

Reflexion

Wer hat welchen Beitrag geleistet?

Jeder hat seine eigene ePA in Betrieb genommen und erkundet. Das Assignment haben wir gemeinsam gemacht. 

Was habt ihr gelernt?

Nur zu sagen “Wir wollen uns mit der ePA beschäftigen” schränkt das Gebiet nicht sonderlich ein. Die Apps der einzelnen Krankenkassen unterscheiden sich nicht nur in der Registrierung, sondern auch im Aufbau selbst.
Dazu kommen Fragen zur Privatsphäre, wenn schon Daten in der eigenen ePA vorliegen. Den Umgang damit müssen wir noch klären, da wir Screenshots verwenden wollen.

Was lief gut?

Die W-Fragen zu beantworten hat gut funktioniert, da diese aktuell sehr ausschweifend beantwortet werden können. Das Setup unserer Apps gelang ohne große Probleme, wenn man von den Wartungsarbeiten der Krankenkassen an den ersten Tagen absieht.

Was möchtet ihr verbessern?

Bisher haben wir uns noch auf kein genaues Thema festgelegt; bloß die ePA als Gebiet steht fest. Für den nächsten Blogbeitrag möchten wir uns näher mit dem dann gewählten Thema befassen.

Wenn wir uns mit einer bestimmten Krankenkasse beschäftigen wollen, müssen wir uns für eine entscheiden. Bestenfalls nutzt diese jemand aus dem Team.