pause for pain

Pause for Pain is a project that aims to create a mobile app that collects information about the pain severity that patients are suffering after having a transplant n the Tisch Hospital at NYU Langone Health. The main goal is to provide patients and nurses with a tool that enhances more humanized conversations about pain and is an attempt to reduce the amount of opioids that are consumed in those scenarios. Understanding pain and the activities that are supposed to be develop in each stage of the recovery are some of the most important objectives of the project.

The problem

The problem was brought up to the Digital Design Lab at NYU Langone Health by a group of nurses from the institution who have been working on developing a tool to track pain and have a start point in order to have better conversation with patients. The problem that they described when they first came to DDL (Digital Design Lab) was that they wanted to digitize the printed paper scale that they use to discuss pain with patients, however, they were not able to describe an actual problem or to explain why it was so important to digitize this tool.

Coming up with a solution

The process started by getting closer to the nurses and facilitating a Design Thinking bootcamp in which the team would be able to gather the needs and actually understand the problem and start brainstorming on solutions that could provide more value to the tool, instead of just digitizing the paper scale. Being able to have honest and open conversations with the nurses was the beginning of the involvement and collaborative design process that allowed the team to develop a prototype that could be used to apply for grants and have a visual way to explain the idea and the potential positive impact that it might have in the clinical space.

The team also developed some user interviews with both nurses and patients who were recovering from transplants in the Tisch hospital at NYU Langone Health, the information collected from those interviews allowed us to generate a tool that would enhance the conversations between nurses and patients and be able to provide a tool that would facilitate those conversations and at the same time be able to collect information and create metrics with data over time and the dosage of the medications.

My Role

My Role in this project was to create the actual prototype, after the needs had been gathered from the Design Thinking bootcamp, I was able to transform those needs into a digital prototype that was reviewed multiple times by the nurses to ensure that the content and navigation were according to the original idea that they had. After the first phase of the low fidelity prototype I led a user testing session in which we tested the prototype by doing roleplaying and collecting feedback in order to implement some changes in an iterative process which allowed me to take into consideration the input from the potential end users in order to generate a prototype that solve the user’s needs.

The result

The result product of this project is a clickable prototype in a form of a wireframe, that contains functionalities such as track pain severity, suggest activities for a better recovery and collect the information about the medications and it’s dosage that has been taken by each patient. The prototype also contains a data visualization module in which it is possible to visualize the data over time. The end goal for this project is that nurses can present this prototype as part of their applications for grants so that they can actually develop the front end design and develop the functionalities which could be connected to Epic in order to send data in real time to the patient’s medical record.

This project was developed during my Summer Internship at the Digital Design Lab at NYU Langone Health.