Emmi: Patient Engagement & Experience
I had the honor of leading one of the best creative teams in healthcare—a multidisciplinary 20-member team of content designers, artists, animators, medical illustrators, data visualization, and UX designers. Together we created patient engagement solutions that blended animation, behavior science, and technology to motivate patients to get actively involved in their care.
As a Creative Director, I’m driven by a purpose to:
Constantly evolve a collaborative creative process
Ensure animated content is based on the latest consumer expectations for quality and engagement
Streamline and improve the patient-user experience
Bring data visualization best practices to client-facing analytics and reporting
Conceptualize the next generation of Emmi patient engagement products
Fostering a collaborative team process
When I started as the Creative Director in 2017, my first objective was to shake up the siloed production process of Emmi’s interactive multimedia programs. My goal was to create a creative collaboration workflow that optimizes the team's specific strengths.
Using a hybrid approach combining an agency creative brief model, UX design process, and animation studio production flow, the team's creative output skyrocketed.
Screenshots of older Emmi content highlight some of the issues contributing to an increased cognitive load.
Enhancing the experience through science & art
Research shows that narrated animations are one of the best ways to communicate complex health messages to the public. But looking through the Emmi library— built over 20 years—I could see that we weren’t following more modern theories of cognitive multimedia learning. Beautifully detailed medical art appeared in small containers, text often dominated the screen, animations mainly were limited to simple fades, and engaging transitions from one topic to another were noticeably absent.
To top it all off, the average viewing length of the animations was 20-30 minutes—much too long for today's short attention spans. My goals were to decrease the viewer's cognitive load, enhance the learning experience, and create more concise and engaging content.
A new creative approach
With a new collaborative creative process in place, I had the team:
Limit on-screen text to reduce cognitive load
Focus on creating larger visuals and use motion graphics, animations, and transitions to increase engagement
Experiment with new illustration and graphic styles
Write shorter scripts under one topic vs. one long topic script
Use purposeful interactivity to allow the viewer control of the experience
Optimize the user experience of accessing and watching the programs
Take a look at it in motion
The results
This work fueled internal enthusiasm throughout the Wolters Kluwer Health organization, along with external excitement by customers who have been wanting to see a modernization of the Emmi product for years. We are currently analyzing the patient viewing data and sentiment analysis to see if there is a significant increase in engagement and outcomes. Stay tuned!
Improving the patient-user experience under a new brand
When Wolters Kluwer acquired Emmi in 2015, the goal was to incorporate the product into the new design system under the global corporate brand. This was an opportunity to interpret a corporate brand for a patient/consumer audience and create a more unified and simplified user experience.
The next generation of Emmi patient engagement products
What if we combined the engaging animated content, conversational voice, and behavioral science principles into a holistic patient experience? One that can stay with the patient throughout their care journey—whether that’s recovering from major surgery or managing a chronic condition.
Using my experience creating UI for iOS apps, I designed this concept for a next-generation Emmi product that tells a more interactive longitudinal care story to help patients with heart failure self-manage their condition. This concept led to key partnerships, and an MVP is currently underway.
Responding to COVID-19
My team worked at a quick mission-driven pace to script and animate a 7-minute animation on COVID-19 for hospital systems to display on their websites and to send directly to their patient populations around the world.
The Emmi COVID-19 video helps educate the public on ways to stay healthy and stop the spread of the virus. The animation won the Gold Digital Health Award by the Health Information Resource Center in 2021.