Integrating a variety of perspectives into one digital platform, back to the “drawing” board! A workshop paper prototyping for platforms in integrated care.
Authors: Stolwijk Nathalie 
Published: January 2024

This workshop fits best in the pillar ‘digital solutions’ of integrated care. The facilitator would like to share some of the learning experiences during a research project in dementia health care, and introduce a methodology: paper prototyping. This workshop is interesting for all types of (non-)professionals that are interested in the topic “digital solutions” and co-design methodologies, such as paper prototyping. The main idea is to integrate multiple perspectives, therefore a diverse group of participants is advantageous for the workshop. In the workshop participants will be encouraged integrate several perspectives of stakeholders in dementia healthcare, such as those of care professionals and people with dementia in a prototype platform. The idea behind paper prototyping is that it is an efficient way to sketch a prototype using paper and creative tools. Interviewing can then be used to find out how the creator feels and why certain decisions were made.

Nathalie Stolwijk will be the facilitator. She is a researcher at Vilans (The Netherlands) in the area of long term care and has experience in design research and psychology, currently working on the HAAL project. The HAAL project provides input for the workshop assignments. The main goal in the HAAL project to decrease workload in times of long term care personnel shortages. In the HAAL project a digital platform is developed, incorporating insights from data from digital care solutions (such as GPS data, sleep monitoring etc). In this platform different end-user needs are integrated to create a decision-aid tool for a variety of caregivers in several countries. This decision-aid tool gives a supplementary perspective on the health and wellbeing status of the client, and could therefore promote person-centred care. In the project the methodology of paper prototyping was used to gather user requirements for a variety of stakeholders.

The preferred time for the workshop is 90 minutes, however adjustments can be made to fit it into 60 minutes. Introduction to the topic, the HAAL project and the first workshop assignment will take 15 minutes. Followed by 10 minutes of brainstorming in subgroups to gather the different perspectives of participants. During this phase participants can also look into existing persona’s or other data sources. The facilitator will walk around to give advice and help group(member)s that are facing difficulties. Afterwards there will be 30-45 minutes of paper prototyping, starting individually, and finally emerging all the different designs into one paper prototype. The subgroups will get a clear instructions. We end the workshop with a short, plenary wrap up. We will discuss the challenges the subgroups encountered when integrating the different perspectives, and how they solved this. This will be done by short pitches from each of the subgroups (10 minutes total).

In the workshop the take home message is that the participants realise the importance, and challenge, of incorporating multiple end users perspectives when developing a digital solution for healthcare. Getting people to work together with different backgrounds and fields of experience can also be a learning experience.