EuDi, Accompanying the A to Z of Child Short Stature Treatment! – We Hear from Our Customer’s Shoe

In 2024, LG Chem is focusing more on ‘customers’ to improve their inconveniences and provide them with a more satisfying service. ‘We Hear from Our Customer’s Shoe’ is a series through which we look at the actual cases and efforts of customer service improvement. Today, we invite Professional Kwak Jihyeon (LG Chem Life Sciences Company, Specialty Care Department, Marketing 1 Team) to hear about ‘EuDi,’ an application (thereafter ‘app’) that manages the intake of LG Chem’s child short stature treatment.

Hello, please introduce yourself.

Hello, I’m Kwak Jihyeon from Life Sciences Company, Specialty Care Department, Marketing 1 Team. We are a team responsible for the marketing of drugs related to children’s growth. My role in particular is the marketing of a child short stature treatment.

I heard you developed an app to manage the intake of a child short stature treatment.
What exactly is child short stature disorder?

If your child’s height falls under the lower 3% of children in the same gender and age group, or is over 10cm shorter than the average height of the age group, we call it child short stature disorder.

There are different factors of child short stature. The child might have been born small, failing to have a ‘Catch up growth, or Compensatory growth*.’ Or, he or she might possess GHD** (Growth Hormone Deficiency). At times, short stature may appear without a special disease. This includes ‘familial short stature’ caused by genetic factors or ‘constitutional growth delay.’

*Catch up growth, Compensatory growth: When the health condition deteriorates due to nutritional deficiencies or illnesses, causing weight gain to stop or slow down. Once factors that inhibit growth disappear, growth may recover according to the original growth curve or even accelerate.
**Growth Hormone Deficiency: When the amount of growth hormone secreted by the pituitary gland is insufficient, resulting in a growth rate below average and a decrease in metabolic effects.

What inconveniences did the patients and guardians encounter
during the treatment of child short stature?

Once diagnosed with child short stature, the patient receives prescription of a growth hormone treatment from the hospital. The growth hormone treatment is a drug taken at a certain time of the day when growth hormones are secreted to support the patient’s growth. It is self-injected at home every day, which was a great burden to both the patients and guardians.

Children especially have a lower self-motivation for such a treatment. They know the importance of receiving the treatment, but in many cases, they would often reject the injection due to fear of shots and tiredness of repeating the process every day. Parents could only try to coax and comfort their child, and their hearts would grow weak, watching the child cry in front of them.

Injection therapy was indeed, a burden to the guardians. Of course, LG Chem has been providing on/offline education to support them with the self-injection. However, not many of them have experienced self-injection in their lives before. After all, the guardians are not professional medical personnel, and they often appealed that they are ‘afraid and worried of giving injections to their children.’

Self-injection sounds like a tough job.

Of course. Growth hormones have to be injected at a fixed amount and fixed time every day. Keeping the exact time itself is a challenge, and keeping the same amount is another. It would be helpful if the amount of dose stays the same, but it changes according to the child’s weight. We even use a different needle depending on how thin the child is. In another word, guardians are required to pay extra-close attention to their children in the journey of the treatment.

That’s not it. The drug is injected to different parts of your body every day, taking turns with your left and right arms, hips, and thighs. As the body part changes daily, patients easily got confused of its order. Saying that the injection follows a 7-day cycle, patients usually take the shot for 6 days and rest on the last. During the break, they often forgot which part of their bodies they had ended with.

Another inconvenience occurred due to the time. Growth hormone is mostly injected between 9~10PM right before the child goes to sleep. Hospitals are closed at this time, and it’s a pain when the child gets a sudden fever before taking the shot, since the parents cannot ask anyone about whether to give the shot or not.

Were there inconveniences for the medical personnel as well?

Child short stature requires over 2 years of consistent treatment. To make it most effective, it’s important that both the patient and guardian keep their motivation and steadily manage the intake according to the plan. Yet, it’s hard for them to keep the self-injection in track, and there was no way the medical personnel could check if the treatment plan is being kept at the patients’ homes.

Please introduce EuDi, the app for managing the intake of child short stature treatment.

EuDi is an app that accompanies the A to Z of growth hormone treatment. From ‘Injection therapy education,’ which is the very beginning of the treatment, to ‘Intake management’ that helps patients follow the plan, ‘Growth management’ which analyzes the effect of the treatment, and making requests of items and consultation needed to keep up with the treatment, EuDi app can deal with the whole process of curing child short stature.

How was EuDi made?

The birth of EuDi dates back to 2016. Even before the development of EuDi app, LG Chem had been striving to monitor and solve the customers’ pain points. One of the efforts was providing ‘growth note’ to child short stature patients and their guardians. It was a hand-written notebook to lessen the difficulties of self-injection treatment and give guidelines for a proper intake management.

It was then when our team manager visited an overseas conference and heard about ‘improving a patient’s intake experience through Connectivity,’ where he gained a hint of EuDi app. At that time, using digital technology to improve a patient’s intake experience was a global topic. After checking out the global trend at the conference, the team began their discussions about digital healthcare in earnest.

In 2017, a customer survey was conducted. Trainee nurses who were parts of LG Chem visited the patients and guardians in person to hear their pain points, and the basic functions of EuDi app were designed based on this survey. It took 2 more years until the official launch of EuDi in 2019. Soon after the launch, coronavirus pandemic broke out, hindering offline injection educations. This brought a sharp increase in the number of EuDi app users starting in 2020.

What are some functions of EuDi that helped improve customer pain points?

The basic functions of EuDi include injection education, intake management, growth management, and request items or consultations. All of these started from improving our customers’ pain points. To introduce one of key functions, there is a tool to help motivate the patients and check the effect of the intake.

‘My character’ is a function to help motivate the patients. We’ve developed a EuDi character, hoping that the treatment can be of an enjoyable memory for our young patients. 4 types of characters appear with the names of ‘Eutae,’ ‘Trudy,’ ‘Romina,’ and ‘Pendel.’ According to the number of intakes, each character takes a number of steps to grow up as a musician, scientist, athlete, and a cook. This was a medium to show that we are growing along with these characters.

‘EuDi’ badge is another device to help the patients’ motivation. When the children take injections based on the prescription schedule, they can input a record on the app and receive badges. By acquiring these badges, they can feel a sense of achievement. To share a behind story of how this function was created, we got a hint from the badge that we receive by recording our workouts on a smart watch. I guess all smart watch users would relate to this. Every day, your smart watch rewards you with a badge when you accomplish the workout goal you’ve set. Though it’s trivial, this function helps motivate your exercise. We added a EuDi badge mission, hoping that our young patients, too, could feel a sense of motivation during the treatment.

There is also a ‘cheering message’ function, which lets parents send their children, and the children send other patients a message of support. It is a tool to help parents and patients form a bond of sympathy and share their supports for each other. It is another way of using EuDi to motivate our patients during the treatment.

What was the initial response from the customers (patients and guardians) towards EuDi?

EuDi is the first system to be introduced in Korea that supports child short stature treatment. As a pioneer, it received positive evaluation from the patients and guardians since its first launch. The EuDi characters, which were developed to make the app more familiar to children, gained good response. In the initial survey, about 80% of the users replied that they were satisfied with the app. Again, 2 years after its launch, 84% of the respondents showed satisfaction with the app.

I heard that recently, EuDi received the main prize for customer experience at iF Design Award,
known to be one of the world’s Top 3 design awards. What made EuDi win such a prize?

EuDi is an app that offers great functions, along with entertainment that suits the eye level of young patients. We’ve planted motivational factors here and there so that children can have an enjoyable intake experience until they finish their long journey of the treatment. I believe we got a good result in iF Design Award since we did not stop at developing functions required by the customers, but stuck to the entertainment points to help motivate our patients.

We’re proud that EuDi was acknowledged for its strengths. At the same time, once again, we realized that EuDi must pursue the direction of ‘putting on our customers’ shoes to understand their feelings.’

The birth of EuDi is a case of customer experience innovation.
What should we do to think from our customers’ perspectives?

I think it’s important that we have the right attitude and view about our work. If we limit our jobs to drug marketing, it’s hard to think from our customers’ perspectives. If we switch to thinking that the essence of our job is to ‘help children grow up healthy,’ this naturally helps us listen to our customers’ voices with an open heart. That’s why I often remind myself not to limit my job.

Finally, what do you hope EuDi becomes for its customers?

I hope EuDi remains as a ‘friendly app’ for both patients and guardians. Later when the children grow, they could reflect their childhood and say ‘EuDi had been my good partner.’ I also wish that EuDi can expand its domain. Now, EuDi focuses on the patients and guardians of child short stature disorder. My hope is that it could become an app to provide information about children’s growth in general, and approach to future customers who are still considering getting the treatment. Let’s say, we could create a ‘EuDi app light version’ (Laugh). It will be great if I can meet a broader group of customers through EuDi.

EuDi app walks together in the journey of child short stature treatment. As Professional Kwak Jihyeon said, LG Chem hopes that EuDi can be remembered by the patients as a partner who accompanied their childhood’s growth. We will come back with another case of putting on our customers’ shoes and improving their pain points.