Access to medical information for every citizen in the Netherland

The National Healthcare Institute (In Dutch: Zorginstituut Nederland (ZIN)) makes an important contribution to maintaining the quality, accessibility and affordability of health care. Crucial tools to help accomplish this are websites and apps which provide information about medicines, such as 'Pharmacotherapeutic Compass', 'Horizon-scan medicines' and 'Medicine Costs'. We have been helping Zorginstituut Nederland to optimize the user-friendliness of these digital solutions for a number of years.

We always start a (re)design project with a dive into the experience of the actual user groups. Broadly speaking, healthcare professionals use the websites and apps of ZIN for tasks such as prescribing and purchasing medicines. Citizens can also look up information about insurance coverages or medicines that will become available in the future. But who exactly are these users? What is the context in which they use the websites? And what are their main tasks and needs? We discovered all this by analyzing existing research and by interviewing users themselves.

We work together with a scrum team from ZIN to deliver suitable solutions. In each sprint, the focus is on improvement or development of specific functionality. This can be search options, filters, the ability to compare information about different medicines, or the presentation of a cost overview. During realization, the user perspective is always our guiding thread.

During sprints we involve the organisation by explaining both the context of users and obstacles they experience. We present possible solutions and provide arguments which solution is best for the users. We incorporate stakeholder feedback to refine our proposals, to ensure acceptance and to simplify realization of the design.

The innovations in 'Pharmacotherapeutic Compass', 'Horizon-scan medicines' and 'Medicine Costs' have been received very positively. Particularly noticeable are the greatly improved user-friendliness and increased findability and readability of information. ZIN wants to continuously improve its websites and apps in order to optimally connect with users and (changing) practices. We are happy to apply our expertise to help realize this ambition.