Charité hospital
Brief
Sickle cell disease and Thalassaemia are complex genetic blood disorders associated with high morbidity and mortality rates. However, over the last decade, new medications have become available and can extend both the duration and quality of paediatric patients’ lives. Despite this, medication adherence is low among this population, particularly during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Leading paediatric doctors Charité hospital, Berlin, approached Dr Curtis to help them develop a mobile health app to support Sickle Cell Disease and Thalassaemia patients’ medication adherence.
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Applied Behaviour Change conducted a combination of consultancy and research to help the project team understand the barriers to medication adherence. We developed the research protocol and guided on focus groups with patients using a behavioural led approach. Analysis showed patients had a number of barriers towards medication adherence such as: forgetting to take their medication; the belief that medication had limited impact on their health; a dislike of relying on medication for their health; frustration with medication disrupting their social activities and; an over reliance on parents for medication reminders.
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The project adopted a co-design approach to ensure patients were involved in all areas of the development process from understanding their challenges with medication adherence and preferences for app features, to usability evaluation of the prototype app.
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Fundamental to this project was helping the project team who were not familiar with behavioural science to understand its value in mhealth design. Dr Curtis therefore lead on a workshop at Charité hospital for the project team (made up of paediatricians, app developers and user-experience designers) to help socialise the behaviour change model and approach.
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“Kristina helped us code our digital platform using the BCTT framework and provided recommendations for our future strategy after benchmarking against scientifically proven approaches and other popular apps. We iterated our design vision quickly with Kristina providing invaluable guidance that is helping us to have a meaningful impact on our members."
Oliver MacCarthy, Co-founder of Tictrac (recently acquired by Dialogue)
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“Dr Curtis provided the science behind our decision making on which app features to embed in a medication adherence app aimed at children with sickle cell disease. She taught us a comprehensive framework for understanding health behaviour change which we underpinned the app with. After the workshop, she remained a key person on the project and provided support on all aspects of the ongoing research and app development. We now all know how to think like a behavioural scientist and can apply this to our other projects!'’
André Fiedler – Product manager working with Charité hospital
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“Using her behavioural science expertise, Dr Curtis was able to work with us and our partners to identify the pain points within our online referral process. She worked with us to develop solutions which where informed by behaviour change frameworks and was able to upskills the teams knowledge and understand of the benefits to using behavioural science in our work. This was the starting point to us embedding behavioural science across all our work areas”.
Lucie Smith, Public Health Principal, Buckinghamshire Council
