A Design Thinking Approach to Effective Vaccine Safety Communication

Abstract

The highly complex and controversial topic of vaccine safety communication warrants innovative, user-centered solutions that would start with gaining mutual respect while taking into account the needs, concerns and underlying motives of patients, parents and physicians. To this end, a non-profit collaborative project was conducted by The Vienna Vaccine Safety Initiative, an international think tank aiming to promote vaccine safety research and communication, and the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany, the first school for innovation in Europe. The revolutionary concept of the Design Thinking approach is to group students in small multi-disciplinary teams. As a result they can generate ground-breaking ideas by combining their expertise and different points of view. The team agreed to address the following design challenge question: "How might we enable physicians to encourage parents and children to prevent infectious diseases?" The current article describes, step-by step, the ideation and innovation process as well as first tangible outcomes of the project.

Educating parents about the vaccination status of their children: A user-centered mobile application

“…While the accuracy of vaccination data may be higher with this approach, the VAccApp project was intentionally designed to empower parents to keep track of vaccinations in their family and to ask clarifying questions during the doctor's visit, rather than delegating the entire task to the healthcare provider (Seeber et al, 2015). …”

“…The mobile application was developed by ViVI, a Berlin-based vaccine safety think tank and non-profit organization, in collaboration with the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany (Seeber et al, 2015). Design Thinking is an innovation technique first taught at Stanford University with a strong focus on user-centeredness and interdisciplinary thought processes (MacFadyen, 2014).…”

“…For the purposes of the QM program, the VAccApp beta version was provided on Google Nexus 7 Tablets™ as a mobile application for Android systems (Seeber et al, 2015). During the evaluation period, the VAccApp remained on the tablet computers provided by QM staff.…”

“…To enable parents to report accurate vaccination histories, the Vienna Vaccine Safety Initiative (ViVI) has developed a digital vaccine education and empowerment tool ( VAccApp ) to be used on smartphones or tablet computers (MacFadyen, 2014, Norman and Yip, 2012, Seeber et al, 2015). The VAccApp was designed to invite parents to take a look at the WHO-ICV and to engage in a virtual dialogue covering all aspects of vaccines administered to their children, thereby making parents an active partner in protecting their family.…”

Innovative Digital Tools and Surveillance Systems for the Timely Detection of Adverse Events at the Point of Care: A Proof-of-Concept Study

“…The VACC-Tool 2.0 was provided as a web-user interface and as an Android-based mobile application [24,35]. A specifically trained QM team assessed the patients independently from routine care, using the VACC-Tool 2.0.…”