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Improving self-triage on Out-Of-Hours primary care clinic websites

Persijn van Meerten, P.E.C. van (2023) Improving self-triage on Out-Of-Hours primary care clinic websites.

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Abstract:Background: Currently, Dutch out-of-hours (OOH) primary care clinics are experiencing increasing work pressure. The increasing work pressure is because two third of the nonurgent patient contacts are unnecessary. To take some pressure of the OOH primary care clinic, Moet ik naar de dokter? (MINDD), invented a self-triage widget. With the self-triage widget, the patient can assess whether and when it is necessary to contact the general practitioner (GP) or OOH primary care clinics. The self-triage instrument consists of general questions and questions about the health problem of the user. After completing the self-triage, the patient gets a contact advice. This tells the patient whether it is necessary to contact the doctor and when they should do it. The purpose of this research is to investigate why users are non-adherent to the MINDD self-triage widget and what should be changed in order to increase the user-adherence. Website visitors who do not start the self-triage and users who stop the self-triage or do not follow the advice are considered non-adherent. Method: Multiple designs were used in this research. Three surveys were conducted, log data was analysed, experts’ opinion was obtained, and A/B tests were performed. The surveys gained information about the users’ intention to follow the self-triage advice, reasons for not completing the self-triage and preferred designs for the self-triage. The brainstorming session with UX design experts focussed on how more people will start the self-triage, more users complete the self-triage, and more users follow the advice. A/B testing was used to see which colour attracts the most people to start the self-triage. Log data was collected to see where users stopped the self-triages. All data was collected from three different Dutch OOH primary care clinic websites and one survey was also distributed among the researcher’s own network. Results: 84% of the respondents had the intention to follow the advice. The top three reasons to stop the self-triage were; 29% the questions do not fit my health problem, 21% I can not clarify my health problem, and 19% I think my health problem is too urgent. 35% of the self-triages were not completed. 74% of the not completed self-triages were stopped during the general questions and clarifying the health problem. 26% stopped elsewhere in the triage flow. The most last seen question in the triage flow was a pain scale question. According to the UX design experts, a calming colour and more empathic text should be used. Besides, the safety of the widget should be mentioned, action buttons should be added, and questions need to be asked more clearly. A different calming colour as the background did not result in a significant difference. Reasons for choosing the preferred design were mostly, ease to use, clarity, personalized content, safety, authority and trust. Conclusion: The purpose of this research was to investigate what should be changed to the MINDD self-triage widget, in order to increase the user-adherence. This research shows that only 22% of the OOH primary care clinic website visitors are adherent to the MINDD self-triage widget. Possible factors influencing the user-adherence are ease to use, clarity, personalized content, safety, authority and trust. To improve the MINDD self-triage widget the recommended changes should be made to the start of the self-triage, the self-triage flow and the self-triage advice, so the user-adherence will increase.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:TNW: Science and Technology
Programme:Health Sciences MSc (66851)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/94667
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