Building an Integrative Solution for Healthcare

Problem

An integrative solution for healthcare is relatively a new concept. We tried to build a creative solution around patients (who are our clients). In other words, we tried to construct an envelope of diversified healthcare providers or professionals around every customer we had, including physicians, nutritionists, fitness and wellness experts, etc. The challenge revolved around integrating multi-disciplines of care of our professionals into one coherent product that should be touching at the endpoint of our customer. Basically, it should be something that is wrapped in one product.

It was pretty challenging because people are from different disciplines, and they have their beliefs and thoughts on how to improve health. Even if we talked to physicians of the same discipline, or dieticians, they would come up with different solutions. The main challenge that we had was to hire expert healthcare providers within the field and make them come up with a plan that would be coherent and conform to everyone.

Actions taken

First of all, we built something that we called the health plan. It was one where patients would get their health plan with milestones and tasks for them to complete. We also built a guideline for it, whereby it would outline that a patient should get a certain amount of tasks done each week. Also, within the guideline, the healthcare providers can intervene and build their own plan for the patient. The physician could also provide his point of view regarding the health of the patient to them.

Since it was built based on guidance, everything was structured with levels of flexibility. For example, we had about 50 built-in recommendations for nutrition for a customer, but it was not necessary that the nutritionist had to write a free text recommendation; instead, they selected the best recommendations he had from the list for the customer, and could set the parameters per each recommendation. By that, the customer was getting the same inline experience as they would from an app, but it was written by different people with different skills, etc.

We also developed a new feature, which was like a personal assistant for health for our clients. The system enabled us to supervise if the clients were up-to-date with information on their health. We also build manual human interventional measures to help the clients succeed on the one hand and integrate them to all professionals on the internet.

Lessons learned

• Every professional has their own beliefs and ways of action. For getting a holistic experience it is important to build a rigid platform which would then have some levels of flexibility within the structured system.
• The way we communicate with customers is an art. It is crucial to remember that customers are sensitive to their health, and you need to establish some grounds before passing on a message.