Alzheimer’s Disease screening support
The project’s ambition is to help general practitioners screen for Alzheimer’s Disease and facilitate referral to a specialist.
This project is covered by NDA.
Context
Brief
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is particularly difficult to diagnose and, at the time of writing, incurable. The neurodegeneration department at Roche had identified general practitioners as key players in screening for AD and referring patients to specialists, and asked us to explore ways to help them do that with a digital product.
We conducted interviews with neurologists (5) and general practitioners (10) to identify the current process to screen for Alzheimer’s Disease and refer a patient to a specialist.
We identified the following main pain points:
short consultation times, where the patient usually comes in for reasons unrelated to AD
symptoms are dismissed as a normal sign of ageing
screening process is time-consuming and is not reimbursed
writing referral reports is time-consuming
no perceived benefit to diagnosis + stigma
emotional toll of a diagnosis on the patient
We ran a prioritisation workshop with the internal team at Roche to identify which pain point to focus on and facilitated a co-creation ideation session to come up with possible solutions.
Identify patients at risk
A person can have Alzheimer’s disease for years before the first symptoms appear. However, there are risk factors that could help identify which people are more likely to suffer from AD. We created a dashboard that shows the risk level of a patient based on their demographic information to encourage general practitioners to start the screening process with those patients.
Reduce screening process time
Screening for Alzheimer’s Disease can be time-consuming and is not a priority for general practitioners. Working side by side with a medical consultant, we broke down the AD workup into individual steps that are suggested to the GP and can be performed independently from each other during a normal consultation.
Reduce barriers to referral
General practitioners and neurologists often work on different Electronic Medical Records that are not integrated. The GP must therefore put together a report, which can be time-consuming. We introduced a reporting feature that automatically logs all the data input in natural language, creating an easy-to-read report that can be edited, printed, and sent via email directly to the neurologist.
Reduce cognitive load on general practitioners
Different steps in the workup are performed in separate consultations, sometimes weeks or months apart. Working closely with a medical consultant, we prototyped a score to assign to patients at each stage of the workup, so that general practitioners can see at a glance their situation.
Methods & tools
Skills
Expert interviews (remote)
User interviews (remote)
Workshop facilitation
Wireframing
Prototyping
Tools
Google meets
Lookback
Miro
Figma
Outcomes
Mapped out the screening and diagnostic process for Alzheimer’s disease
Identified main pain points in the process
Prototyped a pseudo-algorithm to mimic how the product would process data and provide score assessment
Design and delivered a working prototype to be used for internal validation
Learnings
A huge barrier in every data-based product is integration. Integrating the product with an existing Electronic Medical Record would allow to automate most of the process.
Many barriers to a diagnosis are systematic: for example, an Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis may impact a person’s career, even if there are very few symptoms. Moreover, when GPs bill for their time, they must use specific codes, and the AD workup doesn’t map well with those codes, meaning they often cannot bill for it.
The tool we prototyped is meant to be used by general practitioners. However, if I were to choose another persona, I would focus on the caregiver. When a person starts showing signs of cognitive decline, they may deny them or simply forget them. Caregivers are often those who report symptoms to the healthcare provider. An early diagnosis would also allow them to prepare ahead of time for the challenges of taking care of a person with cognitive impairment, potentially reducing the toll it may take on their health.
