The Health Prototyping Centre (HPC) at Macquarie Park in Sydney is supporting staff across NSW Health turn ideas into reality.
The purpose-built space was recently used to prototype and design a drug and alcohol information chatbot for NSW Health’s Your Room website.
Your Room is a joint initiative by NSW Health and St Vincent's Alcohol and Drug Information Service. The website provides facts about alcohol and other commonly used drugs in Australia.
The Your Room team identified the need to improve navigation on their website for a range of users. The goal was to answer their questions by quickly directing them to relevant information.
The team approached eHealth NSW to build the proposed solution and used the HPC to discover and validate use cases by building and testing a chatbot prototype using a ‘design sprint.’
The prototype was used to gather feedback on the types of questions consumers would ask the chatbot, the level of detail they would expect in a response, what they would do with the information and how feasible it would be for the team to incorporate this into the proposed technical solution.
Prototype testing with drug and alcohol service users across different age groups as well as counsellors confirmed that most consumers prefer to talk to a bot rather than a real person on this subject, especially those curious about drugs. The anonymity offered by a chatbot was highly appealing.
The design sprint process helped the team to identify the need to engage a content specialist for the project. This specialist would help construct conversational flows for a chatbot and simplify language to engage consumers in a quite different way to traditional online health tools or articles.
“The design sprint has been a really important element in helping to clarify stakeholder perspectives and obtaining feedback from real life Your Room users on the purpose, look and feel of the chatbot,” eHealth NSW Project Manager Amit Chandra said.
NSW Ministry of Health Prevention and Education Manager Lisa Russel said the design sprint at the HPC was a rewarding experience for the Your Room team.
“An opportunity to get invested stakeholders together to brainstorm uninterrupted is rare and ultimately the resulting product will be all the better for it.”
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A design sprint is a time-constrained process to map out challenges, explore solutions, pick the best ones, create a prototype and test it.
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A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users over the internet.
About the HPC
The HPC is an initiative between eHealth NSW, Health Infrastructure NSW, HealthShare NSW and NSW Health Pathology.
It allows NSW Health staff to come in and test new concepts and designs in simulated environments before they are built.
25 ideas have been tested at the HPC since it opened in August 2022.
Your Room’s chatbot was a recent example of how the HPC can be used to fast-track healthcare solutions.
To find out more visit the Health Prototyping Centre solutions page or view the tour video.
The above news item is included in our eHealth NSW December 2023 newsletter.
Download the December 2023 newsletter
