Healthcare Access & Affordability Research

One of the projects I was assigned to at Delve looked at improving access and affordability of a particular category of healthcare products in developing markets.

The client: a major player in the healthcare industry, with a diverse portfolio of products and several business units

The goals/requirements: • Investigate current barriers to access & affordability • Determine goals and metrics to measure access & affordability • Suggest large-scale process changes to realize these goals in a reasonable time frame

Our process in this project consisted of research, virtual collaborative meetings with client team leads, and two in-person day-long workshops with a diverse group of stakeholders. We synthesized our findings from four main phases:

We collected and processed hundreds documents outlining the current barriers to access and affordability, including powerful statistics and specific needs

We summarized our findings in a PowerPoint presentation, highlighting the need to choose particular barriers to address in order to inform the direction of our research going forward

Working with the client team, and building off of our desk research, we worked together to create specific, actionable goals for impacting access and affordability

These goals were specific to the particular business unit we were working with, but fit within the greater corporate vision of being an impactful force for good in the global healthcare domain

We worked with a cross-functional group of stakeholders from all parts of the business unit, from marketing to research and development to accounting, and talked through each step of the end-to-end product journey from idea to use case

We identified pain points, areas for improvement, and current processes that were not conducive to maximizing access and affordability

For each portion of the process, we discovered new ways to include access and affordability design principles. Crucially, we were able to workshop our ideas and ensure feasibility by relying on the expertise of each department's representative.

After establishing goals and identifying potential process changes, we worked with the client team to decide on a set of KPIs for each step of the product journey

We created visual scorecards of these KPIs as one of our final deliverables

The new KPIs and process changes are slated to go into effect later this year pending corporate approval, and hopefully will help our client impact 3 million more lives in the next 10 years!

Diverse perspectives are key: without talking to representatives from engineering, for example, we would never have known that a proposed new manufacturing process was not feasible given the company's current capabilities

New framework: we looked a lot at frugal innovation during our desk research phase, and I think it's a fascinating way of looking at product design and development for developing areas