June 2, 2020 – News Release
Tickit Health, Ltd (Tickit Health) and professors Andre Kushniruk and Elizabeth Borycki from the University of Victoria’s School of Health Information Sciences (UVic) today announced a new partnership for ongoing research of Tickit Health’s groundbreaking Tickit® solution. The partnership will see UVic faculty from the School of Health Information Science and students leading a series of structured research projects focused on the user experience when Tickit’s proprietary Digital Empathy Design System is applied. The partnership will build-upon the body of research already completed in the US, Canada, and Australia demonstrating Tickit’s ability to more effectively capture information from people because of Digital Empathy.
“UVic’s School of Health Information Science focus on the user experience particularly in clinical settings is unique,” said Dr. Sandy Whitehouse, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer for Tickit Health. Dr. Whitehouse added, “For several years now UVic Researchers have taken a unique approach to explore the specific impact design has on the outcomes of care for both patients and providers. This is exactly the theory behind our Digital Empathy Design System that serves to tune the user experience to specific linguistic, cultural, educational and literacy considerations for each unique person who will complete one of the Tickit Tools. We want to leverage this experience to further refine and validate the parameters of the systems’ design as it continues to evolve over time.”
Tickit’s Digitally Empathetic design infuses the core principles of empathy – compassion, cognition, and emotion – into the data collection process. It takes into account such things as the contextual reasons for asking for information from someone, what that person’s background and state of mind might be at the time of an inquiry, and adjusts the way the question and the body of questions are presented to achieve such things as reduced cognitive load and stress on the individual, removing judgement and stigma from the question, and to provide feedback to the person so that they feel they can more likely trust the process. This approach has been shown to improve response rates by as much as 200% while also improving the quality of the information collected, all of which not only results in better outcomes for the organizations using the data and the individuals receiving support from them but improved efficiency for those organizations in collecting the data.
According to Elizabeth Borycki, Professor in UVic’s School of Health Information Sciences “We are excited to be doing research with Tickit Health on this endeavour. Their Digital Empathy Design System is right in line with the research and knowledge we have been developing at UVic, and we expect that together we will all benefit from further understanding of how the user experience and user interfaces can have a direct impact on outcomes when intentional design principals are applied.”
The Tickit solution is used by organizations serving populations of people such as schools, healthcare organizations, and service organizations to assess, survey, and deliver information to members of their populations. Research over the past 7 years has shown that many of the Tools in Tickit’s library of assessments, surveys, questionnaires, and screeners – several of which were originally validated and/or standardized for use routinely in healthcare and education – outperform the generic text-only versions of these same assessments and surveys because of their Digitally Empathetic design.
The initial research project is being supported through a MITACS grant which strives to further research and innovation. Both the School of Health Information Science at UVic and Tickit Health expect that additional supportive funding opportunities will be available to the relationship as additional areas of research are identified.