About Laastari: quality healthcare can be convenient
Laastari is a Finnish healthcare service company and specializes in the treatment of common and acute diseases. Their promise is to “offer simpler and easier access to health services for busy, modern people”. Laastari clinics are located in accessible and public locations, such as shopping malls and pharmacies.
Project background: healthcare the Laastari way
Customers can walk into a Laastari clinic, no appointment required. Qualified nurses are responsible for examining the patient during a 15-minute consultation.
diagnosis of patient using the protocol shown on the iPad
The status is digitally sent to a doctor for verification. If medication is required, the doctor calls or sends an electronic prescription into a nearby pharmacy and the customer receives a SMS notification with the doctor’s verdict.
information is exchanged with the doctor and pharmacy
Hence, Laastari is able to deliver a new and agile answer to the (bureaucratic and expensive) challenges that healthcare is facing nowadays. The beauty of Laastari is the true win-win: customers get quick and personal help to their basic medical problems, and the capacity of traditional health care operators is freed up to handle more complicated cases.
Assignment: design and develop an iPad application
The simple principle of Laastari is to provide quick diagnosis and treatment of the most common of diseases, executed by qualified nurses supported by e-consulting doctors.
A streamlined healthcare platform, running on modern hardware, is ideal to sustain this business model. Laastari chose to use the iPad as the hardware platform and came to User Intelligence for the software.
Our assignment was to design an iPad application. This application should be very simple for nurses to perform their activities.
Method: integrated approach for the entire project
Understand: The business goals and technical constraints for the iPad application were well-know. However, we needed to better understand what nurses needed and wanted from the application. We therefore conducted interviews with the doctors and nurses at Laastari to get a full understanding of all the requirements that the application would need to meet.
Conceive: As a result of the first phase, we were able to quickly come up with a concept for the system. Then, we started sketching and quickly turned the sketches into an HTML prototype, see also the illustration below. This prototype enabled us to iterate and validate the conceptual design with Laastari. These collaborative design sessions served two purposes; they helped us hone the prototype and helped Laastari finalizing their diagnostic protocols that are based on medical best practices.
Design: Once the concept had been validated, we could complete the interaction design and visual design.
iPad application: from sketch to final design
Evaluate: An integral part of our methodology is the evaluation of the design. It is not a separate phase, but rather an activity that should be conducted during the entire development process. During this project, there was no formal evaluation done. Instead, we constantly received informal feedback from the intended users of the application (e.g. nurses and doctors).
Develop: The development of the application was done by a third party, based on our designs. The design and development of the application was done simultaneously, thus saving a significant amount of time. During the development phase, we supported the technical team by answering any remaining questions. In addition, we checked the compliance of the application with the original designs.
Results: high-quality care and very satisfied stakeholders
We designed an iPad application that contains the essentials of checking-in patients, diagnosing, and prescribing medication when clinically warranted. The application guides nurses through the diagnostic protocol that is based on medical best practices.
As a result, nurses are helped to provide high quality care in an efficient way. In addition, the application allows for detailed analyses of every patient visit and diagnostic process in order to guarantee and continuously improve clinical compliance and care quality. In other words, the iPad application supports the business model of Laastari really well.
iPad with the Laastari application used by a nurse
The feedback on delivery of this project was overwhelming. First, the enthusiasm was strong among the medical staff of Laastari, all too used to cumbersome IT systems in their work. Take for example the response from Anne Kantola, a Laastari nurse:
"The system is just great. I had never used an iPad before, and I wouldn't exactly describe myself as tech savvy. But right from the get-go, the system was very natural to use and hasn't left me in trouble ever since. The cool thing about it is that I don't have to turn to a computer screen in the middle of a customer visit. The customers are also very interested in our usage of the iPad.” -
Second, the management and customers of Laastari were very satisfied with the system. Ville Öhman, the CEO of Laastari continues:
"I’m very happy with what UI did in this project. The concept has been verified by our customers who have given us an unbelievably high customer experience scores, something that you don’t see in the primary care sector that much!".
Laastari now operates in three Finnish cities (Helsinki, Lahti and Kerava) and is expanding to two more cities in Finland and to Sweden during the next 6 months. The iPad application is an important and innovative element in the success of the company. In this video you can see what the iPad app looks like and how it's being used.
How can we help you?
It was great to help Laastari with their innovative healthcare services! Do you want to know more about this project? Or are you interested in how we can help your organization? Feel free to contact us.