Understanding Users and User Needs
We focus on the parts of health care that depend on interactions between and among health care professionals, patients, their family/friend caregivers, community health workers, and health navigators. We have broad capabilities, based on our social and behavioral science expertise, to identify user and organizational needs, pain-points, and opportunities for improvement.
- We are skilled in ethnographic methods, qualitative interviewing, focus groups, cognitive task analysis, cognitive work analysis, and social network analysis.
- We collect data by directly engaging with healthcare professionals, patients, informal caregivers, and community stakeholders in naturalistic settings.
- We analyze the data we collect with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Our analysis toolset ranges from thematic and textual analysis to descriptive and computational models of health care processes and systems.
- For Human Subjects research, we have a current Federal-Wide Assurance and use the Western IRB for human subjects protection oversight. We also are experienced in working client and partner IRBs.
Developing Information Systems Solutions and Interventions
We use information technology to create solutions to the specific problems and needs identified from our user-centered analyses. Our preferred strategy is to deliver the solution through mobile devices, to make it available anytime, anywhere.
We have broad capabilities in Information System design, development and assessment.
- We apply participatory, user-centered design methods to move from user-derived needs to full product designs.
- We use platform-agnostic bring-your-own device (BYOD) development strategies to implement end-user apps and services with a single easily maintainable code-base.
- We build cloud-based information-management backends, using state of the art flexible microservice architectures and application program interfaces (APIs). We have created multiple proprietary software frameworks that we use to streamline backend development.
- Our capabilities include assessment of the usability and perceived usefulness of our designs and final products, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques.