UX Camp Fall 2020
Designing Health Systems For Group Encounters in Rural Rwandan Communities
83% of Rwanda’s 12,000,000 population lives rurally outside of its main capital of Kigali. The Rwandan universal healthcare system was entirely built from the ground up after the Rwandan genocide as a way to address the health needs of all its citizens equally. This system, which is free to citizens, can successfully deliver quality healthcare at roughly $2 per person per year. It addresses the more immediate needs of the country’s rural citizens via an extensive network of healthcare centers and local community healthcare workers CHWs located in villages. Services offered at these clinics range from antenatal care, administering child nutrition programs, and diagnosing acute illnesses (including COVID-19 and malaria).
E-Heza is a tablet application used by CHWs in some of these health clinics. The ultimate goals of the CHWs are to diagnose, provide routine and simple care, and ultimately refer complex patients to the better equipped regional health centers. E-Heza’s primary role is to document patient care, support decision making, and lastly replace a paper-based system that required significant cognitive load on CHW and health center staff.
In this talk we’ll be addressing several topics:
- How do we adapt the participatory design process when we’re unable to have direct access with the users of our designs? How do we build relationships with local healthcare team members when we have to design across geographical and cultural lines? How does the local team aid the work and send feedback back up the chain to affect design changes?
- What does designing for a one-to-many healthcare interaction look like in terms of processing large segments of people and enabling non-clinical staff to make accurate medical decisions?
- Are there parallel challenges to designing for American healthcare systems and those of rural Rwanda and how might they be affected by assumptions of class and race?
