Case Study - How do you bring a Pharma company into the health tech business?

MedX - Multiplying health outcomes

MedX is a comprehensive platform for Medical Practice Management and Patient Engagement. In a market with fragmented solutions, it delivers the first truly integrated platform for doctors and patients.

Overview

The client is one of the top 5 speciality generic pharmaceutical companies in the world, and India’s largest. Active in over 100 countries, they have a thriving research culture and were looking to move beyond selling drugs - towards meaningful engagement with doctors and patients for better health outcomes.

Primary challengers are incumbents with 10+ years of presence in the country - though largely scattered in siloed offerings.

My Role

UX Design
Design Research
Design Strategy
Visual design
Prototyping
Project mgmnt

Team

Principal Designer - me
Business strategy team
Client teams - business, tech, marketing
Development partner team

Key Activities

Design research to identify opportunity
Design strategy for product-market fit
IA, UX, UI design and usability testing
Coordination with engineering, business, client, and development teams

Research

To understand the opportunity space, we conducted qualitative design research with 50 doctors and patients, and validated our findings through quantitative surveys with 300 more. We also conducted market landscaping and benchmarking with pharma and healthtech companies.

Ecosystem Mapping and Competitor Analysis

Mapping the Indian digital healthcare platform ecosystem to understand the features and functionalities on offer - and identify white spaces.

Deeper analysis of the business and operational models of existing players to reveal challenges and limitations faced by incumbents at the outset - to better inform the solution strategy.

Ethnographic Research

Direct observation - Fly-on-the-wall and ride-along based design research to map out the workflows of key stakeholders (physicians, assistants, patients).

In-depth interviews followed to delve deeper into stakeholder decision-making, motivations and emotions at various stages of their workflows.

Analysis of pain points (and gain points) was cross-referenced across stakeholder workflows to reveal patterns, dependencies and causes.

Journeys and Systems Mapping

The detailed customer journey maps of various stakeholders were further analyzed against systems maps to identify potential areas for intervention and improvement.

Layering customer journeys with systems maps helped uncover patterns and dependencies between underlying systems and front-end experiences - which helped various teams problem-solve collaboratively.

Personas

Key target personas were derived from the findings of the ethnographic research. Mapping these against our target user profiles helped the team better understand how to design for different perspectives and requirements.

Problems

Our research identified 3 primary blockers to adoption of tech-enabled healthcare solutions by doctors (and a number of nuanced insights that informed the design).

Existing tech-based solutions - while individually effective - were inconvenient, if not practically impossible to integrate into a physician’s daily workflow as the doctor would need to switch between apps throughout the day.
The perceived value of individual existing offerings isn’t high enough to justify the additional effort required to migrate from traditional solutions. Current solutions are limited to a few medical specialties, with little depth in platform analytics or personalization. There is plenty of scope for creating rich value.
Most solutions focus on telemedicine offerings with a few additional features. Healthcare professionals are looking for integrated solutions that address their complete professional needs - from practice management, professional development and networking, to managing and growing their patient base.

Goals

The problems we identified helped define our North Star goals, validated in cycles of user testing of the prototypes, and qualitative in-depth interviews with our target users. A mix of UX and Business goals, they provided a clear direction for the project teams, and helped align priorities with the client stakeholders.

Delivering an integrated suite of key functionalities will ensure adoption and sustained use. This is a clear white space and the most formidable barrier to entry for service providers - a natural advantage for the client owing to their size and legacy of innovative products and services in the healthcare domain.
Our research showed the vast majority of our target users (healthcare professionals) of Indian healthcare platforms rarely use them after the first install - a major reason being lack of good content and value delivery. Our goal is to deliver meaningful value right from day 1, and to continue to grow this by monitoring, curating and updating the content and service offerings.
Key technology, service and content partnerships reduce time to market and allow the focus to be maintained on delivering an exceptional user experience and service.

Opportunity

How might we reduce the practice management and professional development burden on healthcare professionals, so they can focus on what’s important - healthcare?

Approach

Moving from Product to Customer focus

To establish themselves in a value-based care model, the client needed to innovate around the customer, not the product. This project created a new business entity dedicated to operating and developing this platform.

Image showing a move from Product to Customer Focus

Integrating the customer experience

To truly add value to a Doctor’s daily workflow, all key professional functionalities need to be delivered through a single platform, allowing them to focus on the task at hand - rather than on switching between apps and platforms. Taking this further, we aimed to integrate the task flows of other key stakeholders as well, to deliver an intuitive, integrated experience for all users of the platform - encouraging demand from both doctors and patients.

Piloting the design

We created a pilot solution for cardio-diabetology, to be scaled across priority Therapeutic Areas. This enabled us to design for a specialist physician’s workflow and create a strong base of functionalities to build on and develop further.

Impact

All project goals were met.

A pilot was created for Cardio-Diabetology, as a framework for further development into other target Therapeutic Areas.

The prototype tested extremely well with users and gave the client teams the confidence required to proceed with the project and invest in future development.

A new business entity was created, dedicated to operating and developing this platform.

How do we measure Success?

Some key target metrics for this project include Adoption (focus on active users and feature adoption rate), Usability (focus on task success rate and time on task), and Retention (focus on NPS).