Leveraging on innovation workshop and hackathon to co-create solutions with patients to optimize their asthma care

Background: Interventions to improve asthma care often originated from clinicians and investigators without involvement of key stakeholders, including patients. Aim: We leveraged on design thinking framework to organize a workshop involving patients to identify their challenges living with asthma and to generate ideas to enhance their asthma care. Methods: The workshops were conceptualized based on the Stanford Design Thinking Process: 1) Empathize; 2) Define; 3) Ideate; 4) Prototype; and 5) Test. In a one-day innovation workshop, multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals, patients, and researchers gathered to identify the challenges faced by both patients and their clinicians. Two patients consented and shared their problems living with asthma using the photovoice approach by showing the relevant photos. The participants leveraged on photovoice to identify the barriers affecting patients' lives due to asthma. Tertiary students and working adults were invited to hack 6 months later to ideate measures to optimize asthma care in the community, with guidance from primary care professionals who coached them using remote platform. Results: Thirty-seven healthcare providers attended the innovation workshop comprising 9 doctors, 14 nurses, 4 pharmacists, 3 clinical operation leads, 3 medical students and 4 researchers. They identified 8 categories of challenges to good asthma care, which was summarized and shared at a Health-Hackathon. 54 participants in 12 teams were selected for presentation at the end of the one-day Hackathon, of which 3 winning teams eventually emerged after scoring by a juror panel comprising family physicians in public and private primary care clinics and representative from the Ministry of Health and industrial collaborator. Conclusion: A systematic design-thinking approach leveraging on patient photovoice to identify asthma care hurdles at an innovation workshop, and subsequently a hackathon to generate potential solutions to address the barriers with patients’ involvement seemed feasible and can be extended to other areas of patient-centric disease management.