Generating creative solutions to address over-the-counter medication safety in older adults using invisible design

Abstract

Background

Participatory design (PD) is commonly used in human factors to develop and design interventions. Invisible design is a useful tool that can be applied in PD for generating intervention ideas with stakeholders, to solve complex problems without requiring end-users to be able to entirely articulate the “problem.” This study utilized invisible design to build a community-pharmacy intervention for older adults, to improve their over-the-counter medication safety. In the U.S., half of adults ages 65 and above (older adults) use over-the-counter medications (OTCs) unsafely. The purpose of this paper is to describe invisible design and highlight its value when designing system-level interventions.

Methods

Invisible design is a scenario-based approach that allows participants to brainstorm solutions to an unseen problem. In this study, invisible design was used to elicit stakeholder feedback to inform a new pharmacy-based intervention designed to reduce OTC medication misuse. A series of video scenarios were developed to help stakeholders imagine solutions to the identified patient safety gaps in older adult medication selection and pharmacy interactions.

Results

Stakeholders used the invisible design videos to imagine 52 solutions on how to address OTC medication safety in pharmacies. The solutions were grouped into three goals: (1) Facilitating Patient Autonomy, (2) Facilitating a Pharmacist-Patient Encounter, and (3) Facilitating Informed Pharmacist Recommendations. Many of these generated solutions were adopted as features of a pharmacy-based intervention, the Senior Section.

Conclusions

Invisible design successfully led to the brainstorming of innovative solutions by key stakeholders and could be used to develop future interventions outside of the field of pharmacy.