Digital Teach-Back for Healthwise

Industry-Sponsored Academic Project

8 UX Designers x 4 months

The One where I Boosted Retention in
Patient Education with Digital Teach-Back.

In this project, I was a UX Researcher and Designer.

I also happened to play the devil's advocate — super fun.

Problem

Patients usually forget 40-80% of medical information spoken by clinicians in hospitals.

Outcome

So we made 'Digital' Teach-Back to boost memory recall of patients learning at home.

Teach-back is a technique where patients explain in their own words what their doctors told them to ensure they understood it correctly.

This is what regular, in-person teach-back looks like

Teach

Repeat

Evaluate

Explain

Reinforce

Prototype

We aimed to enhance patient memory recall with Digital Teach-Back,
helping patients to self-learn at home — just like with a doctor.

Framework

To make the content replicable for more health conditions, I made a

Digital Teach-Back Framework.

Learning Objective

Engagement (Why)

Representation (What)

Action & Expression (How)

Instruction

Understanding Conditions & Diagnoses

Activity

Types of multimedia recommended for Interactive Activities

What you need to know

Before your surgery

Before your procedure

Articles

Videos

Articles

Videos

Fill in the Blanks

Articles

Videos

Drag & Drop

Sequence Arrangement

Inspired by the principles of Universal Design of Learning, the framework informs the medical content.

Method

To achieve this, I did the project in three folds…

1

First, I spoke to relevant folks to learn about regular (in-person) teach-back.

Nurses

Stakeholders at Healthwise

Patients

Interviews helped me learn that —

Express knowledge concisely limited to 2-4 points.

Communicate to educate, without 'testing' knowledge.

2

Second, I walked in their shoes.

Journey Maps helped me learn that —

Chunk information to make information easier to follow.

Different learning activities to improve recall.

3

And finally, informed with thorough research — I designed the framework.

The Framework helped me learn that —

Mix & Match Activities to reinforce learning.

Increase or decrease the level of difficulty to improve recall.

Implementation

Simply put, the framework sets up content in order of the teach-back method.

Teach

Repeat

Evaluate

Explain

Reinforce

Learning Objective

Instructions

Learning Activities

Usability Tests

To test if this works, we conducted 10+ usability tests to find that —
In-Person Teach-Back and Digital Teach-Back, widely differ.

In-Person Teach-Back

Digital Teach-Back

Repeat information to improve understanding.
To ‘repeat’ becomes intimidating when not done in person.
Don't make it feel like you are testing them.
Quizzes are easier to interact with as compared to repeating information.

Although, the framework did the trick, we learnt that this experience cannot be human free. Digital Teach-Back needs human overview to ensure medical information is conveyed accurately.

Example

In the end, I imagined Digital Teach-Back to function with human oversight —

Teach

Repeat

Evaluate

Explain

Reinforce

Verify

1

Teach

Use chunking to teach patients about their condition.

2

Repeat

Ask patients to repeat what was said to confirm their understanding.

3

Evaluate

Correct any missing information based on what was said with an explanation.

4

Explain

Ask patients to repeat what was said and confirm their understanding.

5

Reinforce

After explaining, reinforce the information to enhance understanding.

6

Verify

Report the learning outcomes to the doctor to check understanding and repeat if needed.