Carepathfinder : Designing for the holistic future of healthcare

PREMIS

PMDA is an independent non-profit organization that supports people impacted by Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. PMDAlliance works tirelessly to be the heart and soul of the PD/MD community, tending to the holistic needs of people impacted with PD/MD and offering them support to learn, connect, and live life more fully.

CHALLENGE

We acknowledge the power of information and human connection when confronted with transformative health events in life. Accordingly, our challenge is to pursue holistic ways to better understand and improve the human connection between the patient and medicine through enhanced care and communication. The direct challenge however is to diversify funding opportunities and communicate value proposition with funders, including robust marketing and social media strategy for PMDAlliance. We also aim to enhance human connection through successful communication in addition to expanding and engaging the conversation in the healthcare space to create a better sense of understanding.

SOLUTION

We contributed to the exploration of organizational development that revealed overlooked cohort in health-sector nonprofit’s ecosystem of support. We also developed targeted strategy, products, services, and messaging to improve new audience outreach and engagement, while enhancing overall funding potential.

INSIGHT

Through extensive research, four major insights were reached. Solutions needed to consider the impact of isolation among patients, and create new ways for connection and access. Emotional and psychological support of the care network surrounding patients is often ignored and neglected. These can directly impact the quality of care and health outcomes. Translating niche success into national and state levels requires scalable techniques and appeal. Systems and organizations are scattered and numerous, so partnerships and branding are critical for messages to get through. And finally to provide holistic care, solutions need to be multi-dimensional: macro, micro, and across the disease life cycle.

RESEARCH + DELIVERABLES

Knowing that the situation with modern healthcare is a complex problem, we set about our process in a specific fashion. To help us gain more precise insight into a particular disease or condition, we worked with PMDAlliance and focused our primary research on getting the perspectives of patients, physicians, and other actors in relation to Parkinson’s disease.

BRAND POSITIONING

Learning about the NGO landscape, especially the ones dealing with Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders, it was clear to us that we need to highlight what sets PMDA apart from other NGOs to ensure a valuable and original service as an answer to the community’s true and substantial needs.

ECOSYSTEM MAPPING

Through our research, we came to understand that the personas navigate environments and processes over long periods of time, as well as interact with one another. In order to better understand these environments and their interactions, we began mapping and laying out the ecosystem within which these personas exist and engage with one another. This led to the creation of the Care Pathfinder . The patient pathway has touchpoints with each of our personas; and as we develop concepts and prototypes, we will be able to use this ecosystem as a roadmap for making sure that the experience we design fulfills the needs expressed along the pathway.

STRATEGIC PROCESS

To further narrow our focus, we started to ask ourselves the following questions to gain more empathy towards our personas: what does healthcare mean to each actor? Who are the actors in these spaces, how do they interact with and impact one another? What are the experiences of these actors? What does the healthcare system reflect, or connect with in the experiences of the actors? This approach provided us with the more specific objectives we used to shape our formalized interview guide for PMDAlliance.

ROADMAP

As part of our business strategy, we created roadmaps for each of the proposals from designing visual structure and templates to developing database and interface for creation tool, identifying key first and second tier partnerships for testing, and continuously refining and ensuring the evolution of the toolkit as it expands its reach and the partnerships that utilize the process and system.

RE-FRAMING THE QUESTION

“How might we bridge the gap
between health and care?”

CARE PATHFINDER

A network of in-person and virtual care specialists was created to provide emotional, mental, and spiritual guidance through an issue, event, or condition as part of a complex medical event. To aid patients, their partners, families, and friends with the synthesis of difficult and confusing experiences in health care spaces; this service provides practical support in the form of network connectors, appointment planning, personalized experience and follow-up. For the caregivers, clinics, and health care providers; the same service provides their staff with certification, tools, and designed efficiencies that lead to higher satisfaction and better assistance to patients.

IMPACT

We believe that the combination of the different prototypes, insights, and challenge reframing represent a strong response to the challenges patients, physicians, and care partners face in the healthcare system. We believe these prototypes reframe Health + Care to be a system that brings meaningful connection and communication to the complex and diverse conditions faced by the population today.

MORE FROM THE PROCESS

Team: Rabih Ibrahim / Nicole Pokorny / Catie-Reagan Palmore / Kayla Moore / Kierstin Gray / Maribel Feito Rodriguez / Bandana Singh / Monika Koch / Stanley Lai / Killian Castner / Steven Chaparro / Isabella Gady