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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 was to deliver meaningful value right from day 1, and to continue to grow this by monitoring, curating and updating the content and service offerings.
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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.
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.
Why? Because this enabled us to design for a specialist physician’s workflow and create a strong base of functionalities to build on and develop further.
Design Samples
Intuitive User Experience
When the goal is to deliver an integrated platform with a number of high-level functionalities, it is critical to lower cognitive load so that users are not overwhelmed.
We contained a significant amount of complexity by optimizing the Information Architecture and by designing for progressive disclosure. We leveraged established design patterns and adapted them as required for an interface that feels familiar but also new.
Optimising the Key Patient Interaction - the Consultation
The patient consultation workflow was carefully studied across 36 doctors and an optimised Information Architecture was created which captured not just the high-level interactions, but also smaller, contextual details that sometimes only emerge in fringe cases.
The Information Architecture strategy included a few key elements:
1. Retaining a persistent Level 2 Navigation of the various Consultation stages - to allow doctors to jump between sections without having to scroll.
2. Global Timer widgets showing the current and upcoming consultations - to help the doctor orient themselves at a glance.
3. A Floating Action Button that stays persistent in the Consultation window, with key actions that can be accessed at any time during the consultation.
Innovations in Design Patterns
We used the UX design pattern of progressive disclosure to pack in information, only to be revealed when requested and mapped to the users’ natural task flows. Progressive disclosure improves 3 of usability's 5 components: learnability, efficiency of use, and error rate.
Alongside this approach, we designed contextual actions that allow informed and timely decision-making alongside the information provided, without requiring the user to navigate away to another screen or flow. Seen in this example, a Doctor can accept or decline a referral right from the Notifications modal.
Functionality optimizations
Several functionalities were designed for an integrated experience - like this Appointment Calendar which helps manage not just appointments, but also events, reminders and more - all in one place. Doctors can also easily and intuitively switch between multiple locations they might be consulting at, or see their combined calendar.
The Calendar event cards carry contextual information and actions - such as indicating that a consultation is in progress, and having the option to end the session right from the event card.
Companion App
While the platform was designed as a web app to be platform agnostic, we also designed a companion app to access most of the functionalities on the move.
Typography and Information Hierarchy
Throughout the platform, each screen and element was carefully designed for clear layout and information hierarchy - underscored by careful attention to typographic details - for an intuitive understanding of complex and dense medical data at a glance. We also built in contextual actions - to allow immediate response to data through actionable links.
Identity
A graphic symbol was derived from the Medical Cross and rotated through 45° to symbolize the Brand message - Multiplying Health Outcomes.
Samples of the Design System
A sampling of some of the design patterns created for this project - designed for quick and intuitive comprehension by studying existing formatting of lab reports, physician’s consultation flows and prescription structures, etc.
One of the guiding principles was progressive disclosure - allowing us to pack in the complexity and manage the delivery of information in a step-wise manner, consistent with user expectations.
Every element has been designed to retain a consistent experience across all devices - desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
Progressive disclosure in statistics cards to pack in more information.
Actionable insights through linked actions directly on the card.
The timer cards provide a persistent overview of the upcoming consultation to the doctor, to help them effortlessly manage their time.
Event and content cards follow a common visual theme, but are also optimized for each use case.
Design System for Cards and Widgets
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).
