Oxford Computer Consultants - Mental Health - Client Project - Discovery phase
Akrivia Health
About the project
Akrivia Health is a spin-out from the University of Oxford, established in May 2019. They already own and run the CRIS (Clinical Record Interactive Search) platform, which was developed under the UKCRIS programme within the University of Oxford.
What the client needed
Akrivia Health has ambitious business goals of becoming the go-to-place for access to mental health and dementia data insights for researchers and trusts.
We conducted a discovery phase, with separate technical and user experience workstreams to provide Akrivia Health with the requirements to redesign their CRIS platform into a commercial product.
Client: Akrivia Health
Year: Jan 2020
Project duration: 8 weeks
Role: UX Design Lead
I took over the project from the previous UX Design Lead and was responsible for the delivery of the UX Discovery Phase deliverables.
Discovery Phase
Methodology
Over the eight weeks we used a mixed-method approach to gather requirements from internal and external stakeholders, which involved the following:
- Interviews with representatives from different NHS Trusts, including researchers and CRIS administrators
- Interviews with a variety of potential industry users across different organisations
- Workshops with existing users and Akrivia Health staff, to supplement the interviews
- A review of the existing CRIS code based and investigated hosting options for the new platform
User groups
Akrivia Health Staff (Internal users)
- Customer support
- Technical support
- Data scientists
- Consulting
- Marketing and sales
Industry users
Researchers within pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations and management consultancies.
NHS and Academic Researchers
- NHS Analysts
- Academic Researchers
NHS Trust staff
- Trust Data Admins/Trust IT
- CRIS Admins (Trust Data Controllers)
Affinity Diagram
Using the qualitative data gathered from the user interviews and workshops, I created an affinity map to organise the key observations into themes.
Use Cases
Myself and the Technical lead synthesised the findings from the technical and UX investigations. From this we identified the user needs and use cases for the various user groups.
User need example:
Pharmaceutical companies and Contract Research Organisations (CROs) need to identify suitable participants to take part in clinical trials.
They often have a target number of participants and need participants with a certain clinical profile. These participants may be spread across multiple NHS Trusts.
Use case 1 - Integration of data sources
Data items related to physical health could be important selection criteria. Inclusion of data from primary care or community health systems would make the Akrivia dataset much more valuable to industry users.
Use case 2 - Location proximity
Knowing how far patients are from a hospital or clinic is important in determining their suitability for a trial. Patients who have to travel long distances are unlikely to complete the trial.
Conclusion
We presented the key findings to the client and produced a written report. The outcomes from the discovery phase have been used to redesign the CRIS platform.
Akrivia Health is now supporting organisations in delivering more effective treatment – from early stage drug discovery through to post launch service and drug evaluation.
