Designing a Mission statement Mobile app for palliative care: An innovation project utilizing design-thinking methodology

Abstract

Background: Eliciting individual values and preferences of patients is essential to delivering high quality palliative care and ensuring patient-centered advance care planning. Despite advance care planning conserving healthcare costs by up to 36%, reducing psychological distress of patients and caregivers, and ensuring palliative care delivery in line with patient wishes, less than 33% of adults engage in it. We aimed to develop a mobile application intervention to address the challenges related to advance care planning and improve the delivery of palliative care. Methods: Design-thinking methodology was used to develop a mobile application, in response to issues prominently identified in current palliative care literature. Results: Issues surrounding communication of patient values from both the patient and provider side is identified as a main issue in palliative care. We designed a mobile application intervention prototype to address this. Conclusions: Our "Mission Statement"mobile application will allow patients to create a mission statement identifying what they want their care team to know about them, as well as space to identify important values and preferences. Patients will be able to evolve their mission statement and values and preferences over the course of their palliative care journey through the application. Design-thinking methodology is an effective tool to drive healthcare innovation and bridge the gap between research findings and implementation.