healthcare / P4ML Eolas Prenatal Test

Reassurance by Design

P4ML, a division of EireChrom, are an ingenious Irish company offering genetic analysis and testing services to clinicians and healthcare professionals.

EireChrom were the 2016 recipients of the Design Partners Award at the NPA Innovation Area, from which P4ML evolved. Design Partners were tasked to create a user-centric packaging design and optimise the out-of-box experience for the launch of the Eolas prenatal test. The Eolas test enables clinicians to provide expecting mothers with advance screening for a range of genetic diseases.

Building a relationship of trust

The insights from the genetic analysis are empowering healthcare professionals to make better judgements for patients and give earlier, more effective treatment options. A patients’ genetic data is the most personal data of all and when they entrust a clinician with a sample for analysis they need to know it is being processed in a careful and professional manner.

P4ML’s objective was to ensure the Eolas prenatal test would be recognised as the right choice among a growing number of options. To achieve this, P4ML need to build trust with the clinician, and in turn the trust between patient and clinician.

Design Partners set out to design a new test experience that supported the building of these key relationships, by minimising the risk of error, reducing the possibility of a stressful re-test, and emphasising patient and data care through all aspects of the experience.

Design Partners approach was to identify the important points of the clinician’s workflow to provide them with what they need and when they needed it. The very first glance at the kit contents provides a clear and simplified task overview, so the clinician doesn’t have to second-guess how to perform the sample collection. The risk of missing an important step or instruction is removed, as is the need to spend valuable time searching for test kit items.

Design Partners achieved this clarity of first impression, by housing each test item separately within the kit package. Through building, testing and iteration of mock-up models, the visual hierarchy was tuned to the workflow, to respect the way clinicians work and to provide guidance without being prescriptive.x