Point Forward worked with the American Heart Association and the Stanford Cardiac Rehabilitation Program to develop a new, comprehensive patient education system for people with Cardiovascular Disease. Ethnographic research methods were used in hospitals, rehab facilities, community centers, and patient homes in five different U.S. cities.
The numbers are staggering. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one killer of men and women in the United States, taking nearly one million lives each year – as many as the next seven leading causes of death combined. Sixty million Americans are living with CVD and more than 30 million are at high risk. Contrary to common belief, it kills more women than men. Heredity plays an important role, but CVD is also a lifestyle disease, brought on by smoking, bad eating habits, stress, and lack of exercise.
Point Forward is working with the American Heart Association and the Stanford Cardiac Rehabilitation Program to develop a new, comprehensive patient education system. This work will result in a series of programs to help people make heart-healthy lifestyle changes. The AHA’s current approach -- providing educational brochures for hospitals and doctors to place into waiting rooms -- has been largely ineffectual.
Point Forward took its ethnographic research methods into hospitals, rehab facilities, community centers, and patient homes in five different U.S. cities. Spending a week in each city, interviews were conducted with cardiologists, nurses, rehab therapists, patients, and family members. We tracked patient "pathways" through the healthcare system and mapped them to the workflows of healthcare providers. Observations were made of actual physician/patient interactions. More than 100 hours of video taped interviews and observations were collected.
We quickly discovered that the problem was one of motivation more than education. People generally know the basic components of healthy living but many are unable to take the necessary steps due to a complex web of social factors including family and cultural traditions, and longstanding habits of everyday life. Conventional wisdom suggests that suffering a heart attack would be sufficient motivation to change but it is not. Current education systems are too passive and too generic.
We introduced the metaphor of "coaching" as a guiding vision, conveying the need for educational information to be less passive and more active. New programs will be designed to better encourage patients, instill confidence, and build new skills. Point Forward created a segmentation model of patients based on five distinct "ways of being" or how they tend to approach problems and events in their lives.
Six components of the education system are currently under development. New channels are also being explored, extending efforts out of the healthcare system into community settings. |
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