Persuasive Design of a Mobile Application for Reducing Overcrowding in Saudi Hospital Emergency Departments

Overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) is a critical issue in health sectors worldwide. In Saudi Arabia, EDs experience this issue because many patients visit EDs seeking treatment even for a non-emergency health condition. Therefore, in this study, we present and test a solution to help reduce ED overcrowding in Saudi Arabia—a mobile application that we developed using persuasive design principles. The main aims of the application are to discourage patients with non-emergency conditions from arriving at EDs and, if they have already arrived, to manage and encourage them to transfer to primary healthcare centers (PHCs) or less-crowded EDs. The application is framed by eight main design principles (social proof, scarcity, authority, modernity, time-saving, empathy, transparency, and awareness). We tested the application based on a set of role-play evaluation scenarios through a user study with 89 participants. The overall result showed that the application successfully encouraged 73.7% of participants to visit PHCs instead of EDs, discouraged 55.3% from visiting overcrowded EDs, and encouraged 68.4% to transfer from overcrowded EDs to other health centers. Design aspects related to the time-saving and empathy principles were the factors that most influenced participants’ decisions. Overall, our application that incorporates design principles can facilitate tackling the ED overcrowding issue, given that it successfully influenced more than half of the participants. Further, this study has implications for both the human–computer interaction and the health informatics communities because it employs a mobile software solution with design principles to tackle a critical universal issue that affects healthcare quality and patients’ satisfaction.