Innovating chronic care
2022 • EPAM
Problem + opportunity
With over $5 billion invested, my client was undertaking an enormous effort aimed at offering consumers an omni-channel experience to help manage common, chronic conditions. My role was to lead research and strategy on 8 work streams, collaborating with a range of EPAM and client stakeholders.
In April 2022, the client expressed concern that despite significant investment, consumer engagement with the products and services they were building was lagging. At the same time, they were increasingly targeting type two diabetes (T2DM) and colorectal cancer (CRC) screening as areas of clinical interest.
In conversation with the client, it became clear to me that the client had a limited understanding of the pain points experienced by key stakeholders (patients, providers, payors) as it relates to type two diabetes and colorectal cancer, nor had they identified opportunities for increased engagement.
Action
Creating a plan
I began this engagement by convening stakeholders to collaboratively identify the key questions to answer. I then crafted and won approval and budget for a 12-week mixed-methods research plan to address our key questions. Internally, I assembled a small team of researchers, strategists, and visual designers to carry the work forward.
Literature review + baseline data
I began by preparing a literature review which included over 100 peer-reviewed sources describing barriers, pain points, and facilitators for patients, providers, and payors. At the same time, I sought out data to better understand the baseline for key clinical outcomes as it relates to T2DM and CRC screening.
Interviews
Using the literature as a jumping off point, I crafted and collaboratively refined discussion guides for semi-structured remote interviews with patients, providers, and payor subject matter experts. With the help of colleagues, we carried out 27 interviews ranging from an hour to 90 minutes each. In our interviews, we focused on eliciting real-life stories and experiences, as well as the pain points, barriers, and facilitators contained in them.
Quantitative surveying
I followed up our interviews with two rounds of unmoderated quantitative surveying, with 265 total respondents. These surveys applied the Jobs to Be Done framework to help us quantify and prioritize opportunities to address pain points. I also included questions aimed at segmenting respondents along clinical and demographic lines. All survey findings were analyzed for statistical significance.
Synthesis + recommendations
I ran a series of remote workshops aimed at synthesizing our research to identify top insights and recommendations going forward. These workshops were organized around methods for synthesis like affinity mapping, impact/effort mapping, the use of How Might We prompts, etc.
Read-out
I organized a series of meetings with key stakeholders to share back our top insights and to win buy-in for our recommended next steps. The read-out decks were organized around high-level insights and actionable recommendations with supporting quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Impact
We helped the client to get unstuck. At a high level, this research initiative helped the client to better understand the pain points experienced by key stakeholders (patients, providers, payors) as it relates to type two diabetes and colorectal cancer, as well as opportunities for increased engagement.
We delivered supporting documentation. We delivered a range of documentation to support the client going forward: 27 profiles, 8 journey maps, 37 hours of interview recordings, survey data including 50+ Jobs to Be Done, and more.
We secured buy-in to move forward. For example, we won approval for our recommendation to conduct further research to craft the optimal provider-facing value proposition to enter a collaborative diabetes care model with the client.
We began ideation and validation. I organized a series of workshops convening key stakeholders to ideate new products and services in response to our research insights and How Might We prompts. For each concept, we identified assumptions (all the things that must be true for the concept to work), and zeroed in on the riskiest ones. Going forward, we plan to run cycles of rapid validation to test these risky assumptions.