Digital communication with parents and their children in online healthcare

Sammanfattning: Swedish primary care is under a lot of pressure and struggle to keep up with the big patient flow. An alternative to visiting a physical primary care centre is to visit Min Doktor which is a digital healthcare centre offering doctor visits online that help patients with diagnosis, prescriptions and referrals. Today, Min Doktor’s service is only treating people from the age of 18 but they are currently working on expanding the service to start treating children too. When considering children, the parent will seek care for the child rather than the patient seeking care for itself. The design of the service should be evolved to suit the new needs that will occur and make all users, both parents and children, enjoy seeking care through it and want to return to Min Doktor the next time they need care. With focus on children 1-5 years old, a literature study and a user centred design process with user studies and prototype testing were conducted. The studies and tests showed that it is important to involve the child in the care process but that the parents are not very willing to do that and worried about seeking care online for their children in general. The process resulted in a number of design guidelines about the design of the new service. These guidelines state that the service should, amongst other things, feel safe, professional and comforting, encourage the parents to include their children in the care seeking process, make the parents feel like it is possible to cover all information needed in the questions asked by the service including the general condition and also catch the child’s interest and make the child understand that they seek care for him/her.