2020 showcased an enormous opportunity to find ways to better serve patients through technology. At the end of last year, we set out to collaborate with founders from traditionally underrepresented and underfunded groups in tech and healthcare. Commonly they have critical insights into how to improve healthcare, yet often lack access to resources to be able to validate and advance their business ideas. To help them reach the next level in their business and product journey, we looked to facilitate a complimentary Product Design Sprint.
After opening up an application process, we were thrilled to get to meet Dr. Bailey Brandt and Jeremiah Harlan, the co-founders of Health Match 360. The Health Match 360 platform helps patients overcome the obstacle of accessing care by connecting them with qualified therapists. We recently published a Case Study sharing more information on the Product Design Sprint we ran for them in December, now with an exciting update on funding.
The goal of our Product Design Sprint was to identify a path forward in response to some beta feedback they had received that highlighted core issues with their platform. These areas for optimization included improving the onboarding flow, patient / therapist interactions, and overall platform engagement of all users.
After a kickoff call, we hit the ground running Monday morning and spent the week going through our Product Design Sprint exercises. Some of those milestones included:
We developed a problem statement ‘How might we empower prospective patients with enough support, information, and tools to choose a therapist and start therapy?’. We also organized all of our assumptions to be tested.
We mapped out the critical path for users to hone in on a single problem area to focus on; every inflection point patients incur to discover and learn about the product, as well as the therapists’ journey on the other end.
This informed our sketching and ideation process, which after some collaborative prioritization around the most important elements, we moved forward into our storyboard and future prototype to be tested.
With our prototype created, we tested with real users and lastly synthesized our findings for our final discussion and recommendations, highlighting where our assumptions were invalidated or validated.
With our testing completed, we began to see trends. Some net new pieces of information include verification that patients will trust a matching algorithm enough to view their results, that insurance coverage is a large motivational factor, minoritized prospective patients expressed a desire to see a therapist like them, and lastly, that patients are focused on outcomes and may not know which practice is right for them
We used this new understanding to update our product strategy accordingly. These were our findings:
Lead the survey requesting insurance information to quickly share availability
Provide filter controls to offer more inclusive controls on things like gender, language, and ethnicity
Grouping survey questions help increase the amount of successful respondents
Highlight therapist response time and therapy jargon so they don’t feel forgotten or confused
Avoid error and rejection messaging that might make the prospective patient internalize the problem. We flagged further testing rejection scenarios as an important To Do.
Embrace digital communication and explore using additional tools to provide greater ease of scheduling
We highlighted some insight into who some tests had not started searching for therapy, with this understanding of their blockers, we suggested further exploring it as a marketing opportunity
A few weeks after our PDS, we heard from the Health Match 360 team and were thrilled to learn they had been accepted for their Grant. Bailey and Jeremiah applied for the grant with the output of the PDS, pitching that they would use the funds to bring the patient-validated prototype to life. It was wonderful to hear that the time we spent digging deep into their customers, problems to be solved, and product allowed them to be really focused in where their business needs to grow and evolve.
As always, we would love to hear what you think. Did you enjoy following along with the session? What other learnings would be helpful for us to share to help others? Let us know! Twitter:@thoughtbot
