Creating a public health ecosystem connecting citizens, pharmacists, and physicians to monitor hypertension

The visibility problem in primary care

Ceará state had thousands of hypertensive patients without structured follow-up. No systematic blood pressure monitoring, no visibility into medication adherence, no consolidated view of treatment effectiveness. Doctors lacked patient historical data. Health officials couldn't see population-level trends to plan interventions. The public health system operated blind to one of Brazil's most significant chronic disease challenges.

Three interconnected modules for complete ecosystem

Worked alongside physicians, pharmacists, computer scientists, and public health managers over 20 months to design comprehensive platform addressing three user groups:

Health Data Collection (Citizens + Pharmacies) — Patients received educational materials with QR codes linking to BP tracking. Community pharmacies became measurement points: pharmacists recorded blood pressure readings using simplified interface optimized for speed and accuracy during regular pharmacy visits. Low barriers to participation encouraged consistent monitoring.

Admin Management (System Administrators) — User registration, permission management, pharmacy network coordination, and data quality monitoring. Admins could onboard new pharmacies, train staff, and maintain data integrity across the network. The dashboard below demonstrates the comprehensive component library developed for consistent interface design across all modules.

Medical Data Consumption (Doctors + Health Officials) — Physicians accessed individual patient timelines showing BP measurements, medication pickup patterns, and clinical evolution. Health managers viewed population dashboards: hypertension prevalence by region, treatment effectiveness patterns, medication adherence rates, and demographic correlations. Evidence-based policy decisions became possible.

Design decisions for low digital literacy context

Many patients and pharmacy staff had limited digital experience. Interface design emphasized clarity over sophistication:

Pharmacy Interface: Large touch targets, minimal text, visual confirmations, error prevention through validation, and offline capability for unreliable internet. One screen for patient identification, one screen for BP entry, immediate visual feedback confirming successful recording. The interface shown below provided pharmacy staff with clear navigation and quick access to essential functions.

Patient Education Materials: Physical cards with clear instructions, large QR codes, and visual explanations of hypertension risks and treatment importance. Materials designed for varying literacy levels using illustrations and simple language. The patient tracking interface below demonstrates the educational approach with QR code access and simplified data entry.

Medical Dashboards: Clean data visualizations, color-coded risk indicators, filterable timelines, and exportable reports. Doctors could quickly scan patient history during consultations rather than deciphering dense tables. The visualization system included comprehensive filtering capabilities to slice data by multiple dimensions, as shown in the interface below.

Dashboards that inform public policy

Transformed individual measurements into actionable intelligence. Physician dashboards showed individual patient trajectories including controlled vs. uncontrolled hypertension, medication adherence patterns, and seasonal variations. Public health official dashboards revealed geographic hot spots, demographic risk factors, pharmacy network coverage gaps, and intervention effectiveness, as demonstrated in the analytics interface below.

These insights enabled targeted public health campaigns, resource allocation decisions, pharmacy network expansion planning, and evidence-based policy adjustments. What was invisible became measurable, and what was measurable became improvable.

Multidisciplinary collaboration challenges

Worked across dramatically different domains: clinical medicine (understanding hypertension treatment protocols), pharmacy operations (workflow constraints, time pressures), computer science (data modeling, system architecture), public health policy (epidemiological metrics, intervention design), and data ethics (privacy requirements, consent management).

Each stakeholder group brought valid requirements that sometimes conflicted. Balanced physician need for detailed patient data against privacy restrictions. Balanced pharmacy workflow efficiency against data quality requirements. Balanced rich analytics for health officials against system performance. Navigation of these tensions shaped design decisions throughout.

Research-driven design methodology

Conducted structured interviews with doctors, pharmacists, health managers, and patients. Mapped existing paper-based workflows to identify digitization opportunities. Created user journeys for each role showing touchpoints, pain points, and information needs. Prototyped interfaces iteratively with stakeholder testing and feedback incorporation.

Applied HCI research methodology to real-world public health problem: ethnographic observation of pharmacy workflows, contextual inquiry with physicians during consultations, usability testing with users matching target demographics, and continuous validation of design decisions against user needs and technical constraints.