MED+
Reimagining Services for Mexican Healthcare Systems
In Latin America, elders rarely reside in retirement homes. Children are expected to care for them, but balancing this with work and family is challenging.
In Latin America, elders rarely reside in retirement homes. Children are expected to care for them, but balancing this with work and family is challenging.
User Experience Researcher
4 Months
Daphne Hernandez
Andrea Espejel
Maria Fernanda Segura
User Research
Visual Design
Service Design
→ Elders in LATAM prefer to spend their final years with their grown children rather than moving to retirement homes.
→ Due to work commitments, children are unable to accompany elders to medical visits.
→ Elders struggle to manage their medical visits independently, leading to difficulty in tracking medication instructions and progress.
→ Ineffective communication about health status with family members can result in poor therapeutic adherence.
→ Dependence on grown children for medical treatment follow-up exacerbates therapeutic adherence challenges.
These individuals often contend with complex medication regimens, vital for managing their conditions and preventing premature mortality.
Poor therapeutic adherence, influenced by socioeconomic, healthcare-system, patient-related, and disease-related factors, compounds the challenge, underscoring the urgency of effective solutions.
Ensuring optimal therapeutic adherence is crucial for elder health, fostering independence, and reducing caregiver burden. Supporting treatment adherence promotes healthier, more fulfilling lives for older adults, easing strain on caregivers and the healthcare system.
Based on primary and secondary research, we identified several direct causes contributing to poor therapeutic adherence among the elderly population
Mexican elders typically visit three pharmacies on average to obtain all their medications, as they often cannot find all prescribed drugs in one location. This fragmented experience creates obstacles to achieving optimal therapeutic adherence.
In Mexico, cash remains the preferred payment method, particularly when purchasing medication. However, the necessity to carry large sums of cash creates significant anxiety among individuals, as they fear potential theft and personal harm.
Mexican elders usually scribble their medicine schedule on the same commercial boxes where medicines are packed. This leads to challenges in tracking which medicines they've taken, the timing, and the remaining quantity.
73 years old
Retired
He's a widower and now lives with her daughter's family
TV and Smartphone (Facebook & Whatsapp)
-No issues encountered during doctor’s check-ups
-Spent most of their time with their grandchildren
-Feeling as independent as possible
-Feeling as a “burden” for her family daughter
-Spending too much time and energy looking for his medications
-Not being able to save money on pharmacies
We created a clinic program that through a highly intuitive interface, elders and their family can better keep track of their medical treatment and health status
A rechargeable chip that can be used as a payment method. It can be used as a keychain or can be kept inside a wallet.
Are meant to be placed in every affiliated pharmacy, it has a voice assistant and direct access to the system.
Allows access to the system from anywhere, the visualization of treatment progress and the products available in affiliated pharmacies
In our testing phase, our sample group consisted on people from 50 - 60 years old. We evaluated the interface we created through heatmaps. According to the results obtained, we decided to add features such as letter size adjusting, voice assistant and location maps to better suit the user experience.
We encountered individuals with low vision or blindness who needed voice assistance to navigate through screens
We noticed our users frequently needed to adjust letter size in every app, so we added this feature
The initial colors for our call-to-action buttons were not effective, so we changed them to help users easily understand their choices
We discovered the need to include maps for users to precisely locate the pharmacies they wanted to visit
