beHAV is a service that holistically supports patients with mental health issues and psychiatric hospitals with digital healthcare methods. beHAV recommends the best suitable clinic based on patients’ information, context, and status. The beHAV app offers Smart Questionnaire, an online solution to overcome long waiting times. It also provides session reports in recording and summary so that the patient can remember easily and access the consultation/care content. beHAV app is created from a service design-first mindset and solves difficult problems with advanced technology and seamless user experiences.

Idea

Patients with mental health issues are suffering from inability to find clinics, long waiting times, and difficulty to access and manage their own medical records. The service aims to enhance such experiences by reducing pain points with digital healthcare services.

Based on real user reviews, beHAV transparently discloses information to help patients make decisions of right mental clinic for them. In addition, it provides a proactive online test to reduce waiting time. Moreover, beHAV analyzes user data to provide a customized progress report. It has access to the user’s psychiatric treatment record and check the patient’s medical trends.

Form

The beHAV app helps improve patients’ psychiatric treatment experience. Since the app deals with a sensitive and private field of treatment, it emphasizes ‘reliability.’ In addition, beHAV aims to solve the difficulties that patients encounter and improve their experiences. In order to achieve this goal, ‘intuition’ was chosen as the keyword for the app’s aesthetics.

beHAV provides intuitive and reliable information for its users to find doctors. Its structure makes it easy to find a doctor who is well-suited to the users at a glance. In addition, calendar and graph views are presented to suit the users’ own medical records and trends.

Function

In order to meet increased mental healthcare demands more effectively, the beHAV app provides three main features. The beHAV service provides clinic information from a patient-centered perspective. It recommends the best doctor based on each user’s context (symptom, age, preference, etc.) by analyzing reviews and inputs made by the user.

beHAV improves patients’ convenience and security by introducing online questionnaires and reduce waiting times at hospitals. The service provides digital records so that the users can see the consultation/care content. The visualization within the app helps the users easily recognize their progress.

Differentiation

Unlike other apps that provide information about clinics, beHAV delivers focused services dedicated to mental healthcare. In psychiatric treatment, close ties between doctors and patients are very important. beHAV collects and analyzes dedicated reviews and data to improve the process of finding the right doctor.

In addition, a large proportion of psychiatric treatment is occupied by the conversation between the doctor and the patient. beHAV’s smart questionnaire service is provided online, significantly reducing the waiting time. Doctors can also use online-based data for more effective sessions than ever before.

Impact

Although the number of patients has been steadily increasing over the past six years, the imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in short treatment and long waiting times. In addition, false prejudices on psychiatric treatment in Korea have caused closedness toward relevant information, which is a problem.

beHAV seeks to solve this unsatisfactory experience by influencing behaviors and habits. Patients can track their mood changes and get customized color picks and encouraging messages as they record their status. Developing a habit of checking one’s state of mind can supplement the lack of treatment, provide more information to doctors, and help patients to access appropriate mental care.

Problems

In the recent five years, the number of patients with GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) has increased more than double. According to the 2012-2016 mental health treatment records by the KHIC (South Korean Health Insurance Corporation), the number of patients reached 12.27 million over the past five years and continues to increase. However, the supply of psychiatry is not able to meet the increasing demands. Thus, mental health issues are becoming more difficult to solve and patients are suffering from the below problems.

• It is difficult to find the right psychiatrist and there is a lack of information about each psychiatrist clinic.
• Answering psychiatry tests with over 500 questions is time consuming, increases the burden on the medical doctor to analyze, and is the main cause of long waiting time.
• Patients are having difficulties in accessing and managing their own medical records. Personal medical data is mostly stored in and managed by clinics.

Solution

Psychiatric care is mostly done through verbal conversations. Therefore, the record of treatment is often dependent on patients’ recollections. The beHAV app provides recorded and summarized session reports, providing users with an opportunity to remember and access the consultation/care content easily.

Design

Patients with mental issues are a difficult user group to handle. Thus, the team behind the beHAV app needed to put extra care and consideration during the development process. As a result, the team has developed a service with a user-centered approach to satisfy complex user needs. beHAV app is the result of a service design mindset and experience design with a careful development process.

beHAV – Healthcare Digital Service Design/ Copyright © OND Lab – UNIST