Strategies for engaging clinical participants in the co-design of software for healthcare domains

TL;DR

This paper explores strategies to improve engagement of clinical participants in co-design processes for healthcare software, highlighting challenges, interventions, and barriers encountered during a data annotation tool study.

Contribution

It evaluates the effectiveness of various engagement strategies in clinical co-design, providing insights into overcoming participation barriers in healthcare software development.

Findings

Certain engagement strategies improved participation rates.

Barriers included time constraints and clinical workload.

Interventions varied in effectiveness across study stages.

Abstract

Co-design is an effective method for designing software, but implementing it within the clinical setting comes with a set of unique challenges. This makes recruitment and engagement of participants difficult, which has been demonstrated in our study. Our work focused on designing and evaluating a data annotation tool, however, different types of interventions had to be carried out due to poor engagement with the study. We evaluated the effectiveness and feasibility of each of these strategies, their applicability to different stages of co-design research and discussed the barriers to participation present among participants from a clinical background.