Overview
The goal of Pet Health Network (PHN) is to improve communications between veterinary clinics and pet owners by offering rich visual pet care content right in the exam room. They recognized that busy veterinary clinics need readily accessible tools to educate their clients about follow-up care and preventive measures. The one-on-one clinical interaction would be enhanced by supplemental educational experiences that reinforce the veterinarian's advice about proactive pet care. A web component would round out the experience by allowing pet owners to revisit the content they were exposed to in the veterinary clinic.
PHN turned to Image Works as its creative and technical partner. The challenges were complex: develop a custom system to manage and deliver the content in two environments, design effective interactions on the kiosk and the website, and incorporate visually rich educational tools. Meeting the needs of several audiences, each with competing requirements, was the underlying user experience challenge. The interaction should engage, compel and drive pet owners to provide better pet care and reinforce the positive relationship with their veterinary clinic.
Solution
After evaluating commercial kiosk solutions and content management systems (CMS), we selected a CMS to store and maintain the PHN content. The CMS delivers content to clinic websites as well as the kiosk via a custom software solution. We used Adobe Flash to handle the display of information and the user interaction on the kiosk, and developed a custom update service to maintain the data stored in XML files and to deliver daily updates of the Flash application to a distributed network of kiosks located in clinics throughout the U.S.
User research and in-clinic beta testing of critical new features drove the interface and graphic design. We analyzed survey data from kiosk beta users to identify features that were underutilized and adjusted the design to improve results.
Adding to core comprehensive disease and condition content are movies that show pet owners how to provide homecare, and tell a dramatic story about the parasites that can cause major health problems. A 3-D anatomy section has a drawing feature that allows veterinarians to illustrate problems on the diagram. These can be emailed to the client or printed in the clinic.
Other special areas focus on topics of key interest, like oral disease, and feature short movies and illustrative images. A pet history form gathers information about pets and becomes the basis of the pet's medical record.
User Benefits
Our interaction design makes the exam room touch screen an innovative approach to client education in the veterinary clinic. Pet owners can independently explore a vast library of content or watch short educational movies either in the clinic before the exam or at home on their clinic's website.
Veterinary technicians use the how-to movies to clearly and quickly explain common homecare techniques, assuring that no topic is missed or poorly taught. And veterinarians have at their disposal a rich visual tool for communicating with their clients about pet health issues.
The exam room kiosk and web site are improving communications and overall pet health.
Client Success
Pet Health Network is fully operational and installed in veterinary clinics throughout the U.S., with plans to expand to Spanish-speaking countries in South America.
The distributed network fed by a central CMS is a stable solution well-positioned for growth in its customer base.
Adobe Flash has proved to be the perfect development tool for building rich media educational content for the veterinary market.