This idea was selected as one of the OpenIDEO challenge "Top Ideas," and is now in the Impact phase. Stay tuned!
Timeline-based To-do Lists for the Prenatal-through-Postnatal Experience. Restructuring complex info into timely task-based lists can simplify and reduce mental load throughout this often-overwhelming journey.
Anna Lee
https://github.com/annamatic/Bean2Baby/blob/master/ReadMe.md
Imagine this
- Your office has just received a new model printer, with numerous advanced features. You need to print out some documents, and don’t know how to use the new machine. There is a thick user manual detailing all the features and how to troubleshoot, and a single-page, 3-step Quick Start Guide. If you only had 5-minutes and your boss was breathing down your back, which guide would you consult?
- You’ve just landed in a foreign country where you will be living for several years. You’re hungry and tired, but you have no local currency and do not speak the local language. Which should you open first: your travel guide with sections on banking, restaurants and helpful phrases? Or your textbook about the region’s history and economy?
Planning a journey
For many, the transition from pregnancy through to parenthood is like a being given a complicated new appliance with no clear instructions, or embarking on a journey to a new land without an appropriate guidebook.
Of course, it helps to have information about what the future holds, and much of that is already freely available via various media and languages scattered across the Internet. But, for parents, the path of nurturing a healthy baby through pregnancy and birth requires not only information, but support in turning that information into particular actions and new habits -- relating to insurance, medical appointments, personal health, employment, etc. -- at specific and repeated times throughout the journey. Research has shown that, for the under-resourced in particular -- and this may include anyone lacking time, social support or mental/physical wellness in addition to those lacking financial resource -- the stress of thinking about and dealing with scarcity leaves very little mental space to learn new information or put it into practice.
Health and community advocates across the U.S. are doing hard work compiling and communicating this information to their under-resourced constituents, but could they benefit from consolidating their efforts?
Task lists organized by timeline
This idea proposal would take already-existing informational resources about the prenatal-through-postnatal journey -- sourced from non-advertising-influenced organizations (government agencies, NGO's, patient and community advocates, etc.) -- and re-write and re-organize them into timely, task-based lists.
Why is especially-written content needed?
While much of the prenatal health education content currently found online is ripe with motivational call-to-actions designed to spur users to visit advertiser links and/or buy products, and information on non-profit/government websites are indeed factual, relevant and helpful, a key problem remains: information overload is a significant barrier to entry in navigating a complex/ fractured healthcare system, AND is an impediment for the under-resourced when it comes to taking appropriate health-related actions when needed.
Further reading about cognitive load and poverty:
- Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function. Anandi Mani et al., Science 30 Aug 2013.
- Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, 2013, Times Books ( imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC)
- The Cognitive Load of Poverty. Even Nesterak, The Psych Report September 2 2013
Learnings from the field of instructional design as well as other behavioral science insights can inform how best to write, structure and organize this content. For example, trained instructional and educational designers often use tricks such as supplying information via complementary auditory and visual channels and/or priming audiences with pre-training and scaffolding support.
Further reading about instructional design:
What will make Bean2Baby To-do Lists different from other online perinatal health information?
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WHAT: This content will be written with the goal of facilitating actions, namely a) connecting users to the healthcare resources they need and b) learning to build healthy habits often under difficult circumstances.
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WHEN: Tasks will be categorized along a weekly (or daily) timeline and and grouped into the pregnancy stages (Prepregnancy, 1st Trimester, 2nd Trimester, 3rd Trimester, Birth, 1st Month Postnatal). There can also be categories for actions to be taken in the Morning, Afternoon and Night. Tasks that ought to be done consistently (eating healthy meals, staying fit, de-stressing) can appear multiple times to aid habit formation.
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HOW: The format and writing of each Task is extremely critical to carrying out Bean2Baby’s goals. Therefore, the Bean2Baby resource will also include guidelines for how contributors should write additional Tasks. Partnerships with trusted and non-advertising-influenced health organizations, a tight editing process and a style guide will ensure that each Task is consistently worded.
Here are some rules that each Task will need to conform to:
- Writing should avoid broad and passively-constructed, albeit "inspiring," wording in favor of more concrete, specific and actionable wording.
- Writing should address critical issues where users may especially lack support (such as mental health, depression, domestic violence, food deserts) and provide either direct access to a local resource via phone number or hyperlink.
- Writing should incorporate "if-then" planning, communicate simple “bite-sized” tips towards building healthy habits, routinizing regularly required behaviors and taking into account the access issues that the under-resourced often face.
- Each task should be limited to 1 action, broken into a “why,” “what” and “how.”
Here are examples of incorrectly- and correctly- written Tasks:
❌ Eat a healthy diet! A balanced and nutritious diet is essential for your baby's development.
✅ Pick up fruits, veggies and protein for the week so you’ll always have a nutritious snack on hand when you get hungry. Is affordable, fresh food hard to find in your area? WIC may be able to help.
How will the content in these To-do Lists be customized to address local or specific needs? How will we disseminate this content to those who need it?
Developing appropriate content for the To-do Lists and then disseminating them to the people that need them most are critically important issues. To address them, Bean2Baby To-do Lists will be housed online as an Open Education Resource (OER). Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational resources that are publicly available, free to use, and licensed to copy, adapt and distribute with no fee. They can be hosted on an open education network in partnership with a university (e.g. guides.nyu.edu/health/oer and open.umich.edu) or they can be self-hosted.
Therefore, while the ultimate end-user of this information include under-resourced expectant parents, the immediate and primary users for this resource would be:
1. Organizations that want to contribute to the content (patient advocacy groups, chronic illness advocacy groups, local/community organizations, immigrant or refugee groups, other non-profits or government entities that serve under-resourced populations) in order to consolidate information and avoid duplicating effort
Examples:
- A community organization in Toledo can adapt the original Bean2Baby guide to create a "Bean2Baby: Toledo, OH" list with locally relevant phone numbers and websites, to distribute to newly pregnant women in Toledo.
- A community advocacy in New York can create a “Bean2Baby: en Español” list translated to Spanish and with links to resources in Spanish, benefiting other Spanish-speaking populations
- A health advocacy can create a “Bean2Baby: for Type 1 Diabetics” with added Tasks that specifically address the concerns of those with Type 1 Diabetes.
In speaking with OpenIDEO mentors Stefanie Boltz (Senior Program Manager, Innovating Education in Reproductive Health) and Kay Matthews (Founder, Shades of Blue), I learned that Bean2Baby's goals are aligned with those of health and community advocates — groups who are doing hard work “on the ground” and have each developed local expertise in helping under-resourced expecting parents. I envision Bean2Baby as providing an "on-ramp" for them to get their expertise into a more centralized location where they can help one another.
2. Organizations developing a product or service that could use the content (health/technology startups, women/family-issues media, patient advocacy groups, chronic illness local/community organizations, immigrant or refugee groups, non-profits or government entities that serve under-resourced populations)
Examples:
- A medical practice can supply them as handouts to patients
- A community organization can use it to design a brochure or handbook
- A civic health/technology startup might use it for a mobile app
Putting this To-do List content under free-to-use copyright licensing would not only be convenient and affordable for community and patient advocates, it would encourage third parties (designers, product developers, civic entrepreneurs/technologists, health organizations) to use and disseminate these Tasks and To-do Lists more widely via various media channels or modalities. I hope that putting Bean2Baby in an "open-information" environment would give it an "off-ramp" to distribute it more broadly.
OpenIDEO challenge participant Susan Donahoe writes in the comment section, "AND Catalyst Project could use it!" Those who serve under-resourced populations are acutely aware of how time-, health-, food- and finance-poor individuals are additionally challenged by our information-saturated environment. A local organization such as Catalyst Project (based in Madison, Wisconson) could copy the main To-do List and make it their own: edit it to include addresses, phone numbers, hotlines or sign-up forms for local food, medical or crisis resources as well as include Tasks that specifically deal with trauma, crisis, housing and safety. In sharing it back to Bean2Baby, they would also help under-resourced parents in and outside of Madison.
Further reading about OER:
While there are certainly benefits to using an existing "collaboration platforms" like Github and Wikipedia -- these already include all the features and community to encourage copying, adapting, evaluating, merging and proliferating content -- it is more important that Bean2Baby exist in a space that feels inviting, comforable and safe for its primary audience, those working in health and community advocacy. Therefore, although I am currently using Github to prototype, I envision that eventually Bean2Baby would need its own platform and domain, with its own submission and review procedures. I would also like to learn more about the platforms that universities use to create Open Education Resources, to see if a partnership with a university might be something to consider.
"Bean2Baby" is a temporary name, and is open to being changed.
