Persona Guidance

The Blueprint personas help with the visualisation of users and can be used for multiple purposes. For example, they are useful for designing digital solutions, remodelling care delivery, teaching or obtaining a more in-depth evaluation of needs involving multiple stakeholders. The Blueprint personas represent a wide array of different population segments and conditions and cultural situations. However, they are also fully modifiable to enable them to best fit your specific purpose.

Improve care pathways.
Create and explain new care pathways.
Act as a basis for discussion with patients, informal carers and care professionals: identify needs of a community and think about new solutions – personas can be adapted for different projects and discussions, if necessary.
Develop new user scenarios, for more information on user scenarios please see: https://ec.europa.eu/eip/ageing/news/11-blueprint-scenarios-have-been-developed-illustrate-personal-interactions-and-ict-solutions_en.
Help to analyse processes, data, roles, and financial flows.
Train and educate tool healthcare professionals and other health and care actors.
Elicit patient views on strengths and weaknesses of their care systems – e.g., patients asked to imagine how a given persona is a friend whose satisfaction and concerns about their shared system of care services they will give a voice.

Campania Regionin Italy, one of the EIP on AHA Reference Sites, developed new personas. Campania used them for internal meetings and training sessions in the framework of Campania regional ProMISnetwork, specifically in the working group on integrated care.Patient feedback was also incorporated in modifying the personas. For more information please see: https://www.policlinico.unina.it/siti/eip-aha/en/indexen.html
Health Centre Zagreb –Centarin Croatiais another EIP on AHA Reference Site. It used the Blueprint personas in the search for innovative monitoring solutions to improve people’s health and optimise hypertension care. The Blueprint personas were used to assess the end-users needs and helped to outline different change management strategies. For more information see: https://ec.europa.eu/eip/ageing/news/blueprint-task-personas-asset-blueprint_en
For an illustrative case study of how digital solutions can be mapped against the personas’ needs, and how well these needs are met, see the example of the assessment of digital services and how well they met the personas’needs at the EIPon AHA Reference Site in Zagreb, Croatia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6581491/
AFEdemy have used the personas in learning modules for facilitators wanting to implement smart healthy age-friendly environments as part of their Hands-on SHAFE initiative. The personas enable facilitators to better understand who they are working or volunteering for as well as Aydin navigation of online learning modules. For more information see: https://hands-on-shafe.eu/en

1. Specify your goals

What are you going to use the personas for?
What is the objective and the target group?
What outcome do you want to achieve?
Do you have a standard of care or clinical goal you want to reach?
What outcome do you want to achieve?
Is it possible to assess your success in reaching your goal?
Can you measure the change before and after?

The personas could help you to measure these different goals by applying them in a ‘before and after’ style (to examine what needs have been met or not met, and how well or poorly their needs were met before and after the introduction of an intervention or service redesign). Outcomes could be compared with the reference /standard of care for the clinical goal (if available).

2. Set up a multi-disciplinary/cross sectoral group of stakeholders for design, consideration, and validation of the personas (it is advisable to involve patients).

3. Use the persona library to identify the personas that best match your target users. Note that the personas can be tweaked or modified to better serve your purpose. For further details on the personas, you can find the full persona posters here: download section

4. Modify a persona: Consider if the selected persona needs adaptation in order to better fit your user group, for example:

You might want to change the namesof the personas, so they are more aligned with typical names in your country or region.
You may want to change co-morbidities and the levels of well-being to better match your user group.
Depending on the infrastructure of your country/region, you may want to modify factors such as the means of access to health infrastructure, etc. Consider the digital solutions which may best fit the personas needs.

See this breakdown of the existing technologies that fit to different ICT solution categories

ICT solution category	Examples of ICT solutions / tools / services
ICT support to health & wellbeing, health & social care delivery / EHRs, management of health data / health information exchange	Interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Patient Portals Electronic consultations and appointments Secure and reliable search portals for health information Booking solutions for care support Health data management solutions Personal health folder apps 24/7 eHealth call centre (e.g., run by nurses) ICT for integrated care supporting e.g., shared care plan, multi-disciplinary team (MDT), etc.
Telehealth / Telecare / Home care / Tele-monitoring	Teleconsultations with child and mental health services Monitoring of health parameters (weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, etc.) Internet of (medical) Things Telecare personal alarms Panic button service Medication reminders / smart medication dispensers Access to assistance during emergencies Vibrating carer alerts linked to movement sensors in the house Electronic diary with visual and auditory reminders Physical training solutions e.g., to monitor running or other sports or activities Self-monitoring of frailty Tele-assistance subscription service – supervising daily activity trends of elderly people, notifications of potential risk situations Wearables
Smart homes and agefriendly environments (e.g., home sensors, IoT, AAL, IL)	Home or property sensors Internet of (non-medical) Things Regulated heating systems Food shopping support Home health / wellbeing monitoring (see also Telehealth) Support for daily routines Wearables
Social or peer support / social networks, messaging	Networking apps (e.g., sports or cooking clubs, social events, healthy lifestyle groups) Discussion fora (e.g., to exchange similar experiences) Easy phone / video connections (e.g., to connect with children or neighbours) Platforms to put care givers and patients in touch (e.g., in case of urgent needs) Online services e.g., shopping, banking, meal delivery, travel
Other	Assistive technology / wearable robotics – exoskeletons

5. Do not forget to reference us when you use the personas: The personas originate from the Blueprint stream of work lead by empirica GmbH as part of the WE4AHA project coordinated by Funka Nu AB. The project received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

It may be that the existing Blueprint personas don’t fit your target group and you would liketo heavily edit an existing persona or create a new persona. Here are some practical tips for using and completing the persona template to create a new persona (the persona template can be found in the download section)

Be consistent about the information given.
Be succinct so as to increase the readability and usability of the persona.
Keep the information as concise as possible (avoid repetitive descriptions).
Keep the vocabulary simple: avoid using medical terminology or provide a glossary of terms.
Under the section “Needs”, describe the reasons behind the persona’s needs.

Create New Persona