The ultimate guide to the American healthcare industry for Product Designers (UX)
Product Design (UX) is still scratching the surface in Healthcare and Lifesciences industry. Some of the brightest minds in this world are still not leveraging digital technology or/and use appallingly antiquated digital applications. The biggest benefit of running a design consultancy is that I get to work with many different clients and many different industries. If I were to pick my favorite industry, it is healthcare and life sciences. Projects from this industry are not only the most impactful but they happen to give me the best design problems. Here are my top 5 to give you a sense of how you could be applying design skills in this industry.
1. We are collecting COVID-19 blood plasma samples from volunteers across the country and our tracking, flagging, reporting and donor information systems are not in sync causing delays in how we qualify good samples from the bad. Ultimately this is delaying our race to find COVID-19 treatments and therapies.
2. Our non-profit helps connect family nurses specializing in autism caregiving and rehabilitation to families who cannot afford health services. We don’t track improvement, feedback on nurses or have modern communication lines. We need an app.
3. When we cook molecules in our equipment, we have to enter everything manually. We are investing in IoT enabled equipment and need help to monitor, visualize, and report how drug development is in progress throughout its lifecycle. This will completely change how our scientists work in labs.
4. We need to find a data-driven way to choose hospitals for a clinical trial that helps us bring a diverse test pool and accelerate time to results while matching the hospitals’ history in a particular case or disease type. We have the data; can you visualize dashboards that give us the answer depending on how we configure the clinical trial?
5. We just found a cure to blindness caused by a certain disease. Can you help us map out how we should approach patient experience and practitioner experience using digital technologies since the treatments are personalized based on the patient’s response to the treatment?
It has taken me a few years to understand a little bit about how this industry works in the United States and I think this post may be a good resource for someone who is trying to see the big picture. Probably not technically correct but it’s a mapping that helps me build a posture when talking to a client and know where they are coming from. And I think the sooner the UX community can understand this, the better it will be able to find opportunities and apply its talent across the entire industry.
Value chain
This is a good concept to start with. Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School Professor & Economist, defines a value chain as the end-to-end production chain from the input of raw materials to the output of final products and/or services.
Business and strategy consultants use this view frequently to evaluate how different healthcare companies are adding value across this chain and adapting to changes. They use it for innovation and finding gaps to improve margins, cut costs, expedite their product to market, etc. etc. The way I look at it is how design can inject a new experience and user-centric lens at these stages. Companies that fall under each bucket often have tunnel vision and often miss the people component. There are practitioners like doctors, caregivers like nurses and family members, patients, hospital staff, scientists, volunteers, insurance call center agents, people who are often missed as a focus in this industry. Folks in this industry are either obsessed with science, regulations, or costs but not as much with people as you would think.
Ripe for opportunities
Each category in the value chain is complex and presents fertile grounds to apply creativity. Things get messy really fast and simplifying is the biggest opportunity.
Manufacturers
While their core belongs to developing drugs, machinery, surgical equipment, treatments, therapies, etc.. Often systems, processes, digital touchpoints, and collaboration are forgotten which enables them to create their very products.
Let’s take clinical trials which is a big part of their process; How to connect with the hospitals conducting them, how to track the progress, how to track patient information, the method of processing the clinical trial results, these are processes that are still manual or done in a very old school way. There are so many steps that can be automated and streamlined to gain maximum efficiencies by way of digital intervention.
Suppliers
Sometimes called distributors are logistics wizards and connect about 1300 manufacturers to over 180,000 dispensing locations all over the US with 100s of millions of products. They take the legal liability and all the headache of tracking and meeting spikes or urgent needs anywhere in the country. Many of these are multi-billion-dollar Fortune 50 companies and are unknown to the general public. They have problems like tracking the smallest units, managing recalls, helping hospitals meet their seasonal demands, help pharmacies reduce operational costs and procurement costs. All of these processes from what I have observed are done in excel sheets and over the phone. Valuable insights are often acquired by small tribes within an organization but they never scale and take advantage of digital solutions.
One such project I worked on helped a hospital chain save $500k annually on just buying units of insulin because we built an interactive predictive model for any medications that they should buy in bulk for a given quarter from the supplier. They were able to pass these savings down to the patients and this tool was built by a supplier as a service for their customers.
Payers
You are most familiar with these. You interact with their portals to check your deductibles and download your medical receipts. If you are not employed, then that’s where this space gets interesting. What does direct-to-customer insurance look like that can help the gig-workforce? What does access to affordable or inclusive insurance look like? If you consider an employer, then you will be surprised how complex it is for your HR team to pick a plan that’s right for the employees. How do employees know and sign-up for the right plan? So many good problems.
Intermediaries
This is the biggest gray area. It stretches all the way from things like Apple Health to non-profits like Doctors Without Borders. Many of these intermediaries often have a niche solution like benefits administration technology provider working in a B2B model often offering digital products that give clunky employee digital experiences. There is a lot of innovation and start-ups in this area.
Providers
You are probably very familiar with this space as well. Can your hospital's app be better? Can your doctor’s virtual consultation experience be better? Can you read an MRI on your computer easily (still getting CDs)? Can we have a universal electronic medical record? Pill Pack the online pharmacy that Amazon bought, prescription delivery are innovations and experiences within this bucket. These institutions work closely with Payers and have digital portals that help them provide things like patient insurance plans and process payments. Often these portals are deprived of design love and your pharmacist behind the counter is struggling to navigate and find the right brand or generic approved by your payer. There are lots of clinics that are now technology first and bringing doctors under a technology platform rather than how doctors formed practices in the past.
Nuances matter
Companies in this industry are very particular about specifics of what they do. They make robotic surgical instruments, not just medical equipment, or specialize in radio-diagnostic devices. Bio-pharma companies don’t like to be bucketed with pharma, while biotech doesn’t even consider themselves in the same league as pharma. It always helps a little to understand science. You might hear things like “we are in the treatment business, not the curing business,” this distinction alone completely changes the way designers would approach creating experiences as everything depends on relationships, unlike when cured you are done.
Dealing with regulations and authorities
There are many. But these are the 2 that most frequently impact design decisions.
1. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA): They have a process and approval for anything that’s considered a medical device or a drug. As long as any digital product doesn’t fall under FDA approval, room for creativity increases exponentially.
2. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): This regulation protects our information but also creates a lot of constraints when creating digital applications especially when it comes to getting medical records, reports, and diagnostics. Every time you have a hard time retrieving such information, blame HIPAA. HIPAA is developed and enforced by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Industrial, packaging, and graphic designers have long been part of the healthcare industry but with the acceleration in Digital Transformation UX (Product Design) is still overlooked in this industry. Even marketing sites for drugs and manufacturers suffer from poor designs which is a low hanging fruit. If you are excited to break into this industry then keep an open mind and find companies that may be unusual for a product designer to work in. This is a great frontier and one that needs more attention now than ever before given the post-COVID-19 world we live in.
