My PhD

Title:
Developing Data Driven PROMs through Agile Participatory Design and Evaluations of Inclusive Digital Interventions to Support Patient Lead Cancer Care Pathway Improvements

Stakeholder:
Velindre University NHS Trust

The Research:
The existing practice in the area including documenting successful digitised PROMS and studying the barriers that interfere with their deployment such as lack of technical expertise, legislation on patient data sharing, and concerns about the security of third-party
digital tools. Understanding how to drive the process of participatory designing of the PROMS and tools. This work will be simpler when a skilled digital designer is in the loop, but the aim here will be to foment a process that is robust when the designer is not present. This will mean understanding what digital tools can be appropriated, how the design process can be configured and how the process should be initialised and driven (patient side or clinician side?)

Evaluating the impact of using co-designed PROMS on patient care. Has digital inclusion provided a positive benefit for patient outcomes, both in terms of satisfaction with the service and to their health and wellbeing. The PROMS themselves are an outcome measure but the student will also seek to understand their wider impact on, for example, treatment compliance or other centre-defined metrics and integration with the NDR. The work is exciting from a research perspective as PD (participatory design) methods in healthcare delivery are becoming widespread (Langley et al., 2018) and used in large scale projects (Merkel and Kurcharski, 2018; Pilemalm et al., 2008). The methods work in digital (Clemensen et al., 2017; Gui and Chen, 2019) as well as in-person service delivery but can struggle with ideation, evaluating the success of the designs and achieving long-term impact (Bowen et al.,2013). Our approach addresses these barriers by taking an established tool in the healthcare space (PROMS) and using it to create long term impact for designs by acting as a gauge of the success of interventions and as an accountability tool for the service. While addressing these areas will be broadly sequential, the complexity of the area means that there will also be three cross-cutting themes for the work that need to be addressed at each stage: