Culinary Care

TEAM LEAD: RESEARCH, STRATEGY & DESIGN

Culinary Care is an NGO based in Chicago that provides restaurant meals to those undergoing treatment for cancer. I acted as team lead among a select group of General Assembly Chicago graduates who were asked to take part in the project which resulted in a strategy and design of a digital portal which would support patients in the program and streamline the process for Culinary Care themselves.

RESEARCH

Who are the users and stakeholders?

Patient interviews
Interviews with medical professionals, restaurants
Contextual Inquiry
Shadowing processing and delivery
Testing current systems

Due to the complex and sensitive nature of Culinary Care we needed to speak to many different parties including: patients, hospital staff, restaurants and Courtney, the founder, brains and everything else of Culinary Care. We also needed to immerse ourselves in the process, becoming delivery drivers ourselves and watching orders being placed.

CULINARY CARE'S MISSION

Through their own research, Culinary Care had also found a direct link between malnutrition and cancer death. Plus, there was a direct correlation between poorer areas in Chicago and rates of death from cancer.

We spent several weeks understanding the process of how it all fits together and held long in depth interviews with medical professionals and patients to understand what the service really means to them and the challenges they faced in using the service and with dealing with food in general.

CHALLENGES OF A COMPLEX SERVICE

Once we'd gained a thorough understanding of how all the pieces of the puzzle worked and spoke to all the players we put together a service blueprint that helped us understand where the gaps in the service might be and areas where waiting times, which caused anxiety and uncertainty for patients, medical professionals and posed challenges for Courtney.

UnDERSTANDING THE PATIENTS

Who are they?

Patients ranged in gender and ages but those who were benefitting from Culinary Care were normally struggling with other issues than the diagnosis itself. There were many who were struggling mentally with the diagnosis and eating caused a mixture of complex emotions, some had financial difficulties where getting a meal on the day of treatment was out of the question. For others, they were mothers or carers and they put their needs behind those of others.

We spoke to patients who had used the service and those who were still undergoing treatment and receiving the meals. We also heard from carers who understood the challenges and needs of feeding people suffering from cancer.

Relationship with Food

What Culinary Care means to them

For the patients receiving Culinary Care meals we found that receiving a meal from Culinary Care was about much more than nutrition.

"It’s the silver lining, the glimmer of hope in the treatment day"
“I got to bring my children dinner that night.”
“I asked my friends to come and we make a party out of it"
“Courtney just gets it…..more than my oncologist”
“Some days it was borderline should I/shouldn’t I but then it was just so delicious”

KEY INSIGHTS

For patients, getting a restaurant meal delivery gave them sense of normalcy and allowed them a way to celebrate, bring food home to their families and try new things. Many said it was the glimmer of light in a hard day.

We also discovered that the connection with Courtney herself was extremely important, as someone who truly understood what they were going through, many felt she herself was an angel helping them through this difficult time.

One of the challenges however was that for some patients, they felt a lot of guilt, which was complex

THE MEDICAL PERSPECTIVE

Since all Culinary Care patients go through referrals from social workers or nutritionists, we needed to speak to them to understand what their challenges were, get their perspective on why they were or weren't referring people and listen to their stories.

They were hugely enlightening. On one side we had medicals professional who regularly referred patients. One told stories of a girl who'd had a French meal organised for her birthday, and another patient who "finally met a vegetable he got along with". They also shared some of the challenges of dealing with food as a cancer patient, and their own challenges in being able to provide food.

CHALLENGES

It’s not top of their mind when dealing with patients
There was a lack of understanding for Culinary Care’s primary mission (treat vs utilitatian)
They were unclear on who to refer even though they liked the flexibility to choose
There are perceived concerns (over smells or leaving others out) which lead to over cautiousness
Some patients need more support (lack of mental bandwidth and lack of technical ability)

DESIGN DIRECTION & STRATEGY

HOW MIGHT WE:

STREAMLINE THE PROCESS TO REDUCE BARRIERS AND MANUAL WORKLOAD FOR CULINARY CARE.
GIVE PARTNERS (RESTAURANTS/MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS) GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND CONNECTION WITH PATIENTS.
SUPPORT PATIENTS TO ALLEVIATE ADDITIONAL STRESS WHILE ALLOWING THEM TO MAINTAIN A SENSE OF CONTROL.
GIVE PATIENTS A WAY TO GIVE BACK, DURING AND AFTER TREATMENT TO REDUCE GUILT AND ALLOW THEM A WAY TO SAY THANKS.

IDEATION

Client, stakeholders & designers

Bringing the client in, another member of the board and a group of General Assembly students, each team member managed an area to ideate around: patients, medical professionals and restaurants/service.

To ideate for the patients I drew out a treatment day journey and posed scenarios of how we could enhance 'the glimmer of light' and build a connection, and how to turn guilt into gratefulness. In two separate rooms my team mates presented different scenarios particular to their areas.

The next day we brought all the ideas back together and found the some crossovers and key standout ideas that we started to discuss further.

Organising the ideas

A portal for patients to be able to log in and manage their orders
A similar portal for the social workers to be able to manage their referrals and support patients where necessary
A way to send a message back to the restaurants to say 'thank you'
The opportunity for patients to get involved with Culinary Care after treatment

BUILDING A SOLUTION

Creating a connection and support through a Patient/Medical Professional Portal

User Flows

To create the structure of the portal for patients, medical professionals and Culinary Care's management of data, I diagrammed the main steps and how they would connect.

WIREFRAMES & MOCKUPS

To illustrate further, we started by creating the lowest fidelity tablet size wireframes and presented the idea of how the portal structure could work, what the key metadata was on both the patient-facing and the medical-facing versions.

KEY REQUIREMENTS: PATIENT PORTAL

Ability to refer patients within portal
See patients referred, in program and meal status
See calendar view
Receive updates to let them know changes
Access to guidelines for new or unsure social workers
Ability to manage needs of patients who couldn't manage themselves.

KEY REQUIREMENTS: MEDICAL PORTAL

Ability to create profile
Ability to see schedule of meals
Connect with others through community and contact
Manage choices of menu as far ahead as they like
Additional beneficial content: e.g. recipes

We then upped the fidelity of these key profile screens slightly to show more detail, paying particular attention to the content and actions that could be taken on the pages.

PORTAL VERSION 2.0...

While the first stages of the portal were to manage the existing service, we knew that our client wants to expand and be able to provide further meals for cancer sufferers in the form of buffets or food trucks during treatment and even grocery delivery in the future so we presented our client with the idea of a future version which would take this idea of food being inspiration to the next level and add recipes from the restaurants, which would then be converted to a grocery list for delivery.

CONNECTING RESTAURANTS AND PATIENTS

Having spent time with restaurant staff, we felt that adding a portal login for restaurants would be too much - they were already very run off their feet, so we created a simple solution to the lack of connection between patients and restaurants. We initially suggested being able to send an email from introduced the idea of a postcard, which would be signed by the chef - adding to that special treat feeling we'd already discovered.

But we gave patients the opportunity to write a thank you card back, to say thanks for the meal, if the wanted to, to try and change some of those feelings of guilt into positive feelings of gratefulness.

Plus, restaurants loved contributing to Culinary Care but rarely saw anything from the patients plus they wanted to show off their involvement with Culinary Care. Restaurant managers had told us they'd love to display a plaque or something along those likes to show their support for Culinary Care. So, this in turn could be displayed in the restaurant, a plaque of thank yous.