From Information Delivery to Patient Understanding

Abstract

Patient information in fertility care is central to how patients understand, navigate and participate in their treatment. Despite this, information practices in IVF care remain understudied from a human-centered design perspective. This study investigates how patient information is currently created, communicated and experienced across the IVF care pathway at the Reproductive Medicine Division at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, and identifies challenges and breakdowns in the Current information flow. The study was conducted in parallel with an ongoing innovation initiative, and draws on design thinking as its methodological foundation. Data was collected through thirteen semi-structured interviews with patients and healthcare professionals, a micro-ethnographic orientation including a stimulated patient journey and clinical observations, a participatory session with staff, and complementary sources including quantitative patient satisfaction data, social media and website review. The findings show that patient information is distributed across a fragmented multichannel landscape without a shared structure for ensuring continuity across the care pathway. Information is often available in technical sense but not always accessible, timely or emotionally aligned with patient’s capacity to receive it. Breakdowns in the information flow emerge at the intersection of emotional overwhelm, structural misalignment and inequitable access. Further finding concerns the consistent exclusion of partners from the information process, despite the system formally recognizing the couple as a unit of care. The study concludes that meaningful improvement in patient information practices require not only clearer content or better communication, but a systematic commitment to designing the information environment around the patient journey. The findings contribute to an understanding of how information practices in IVF care are shaped by organizational and structural conditions, and lay groundwork for the next phase of the ongoing innovation initiative.