The Situation

A Prototype With Nowhere to Go

A healthcare company and a design firm co-developed a prototype of a pill dispensing device to improve at-home patient care. It was beautiful, easy to use, leveraged smart technology, and had received a lot of positive initial feedback from consumers.

Newry joined the effort to validate the commercial potential and recommend a path to market. Initial analysis indicated that direct-to-consumer wasn’t going to work – the back-of-the-envelope economics just didn’t make sense – so we took a step back and looked at the go-to-market strategy more holistically.

Avoid the pitfalls of design thinking.

Designers are deeply focused on the nuances of the user experience. This “UX tunnel vision” sometimes results in solutions that address an important problem for the user, but not the most valuable problem for the business. The QUANTIFIED DESIGN™ process aims to close this gap by ensuring that the economic realities of the entire ecosystem are accounted for throughout the Design Thinking process, enabling more informed pivots and avoiding costly mistakes.

The Approach

Confirming Viability and Value Capture

Consumers liked the product, but they weren’t going to pay for it – not enough to meet the client’s margin targets, anyway. Someone else in the notoriously convoluted healthcare market would have to shoulder the cost.

To figure out who that would be, we first quantified the total economic benefit of the client’s solution based on two vectors of value: patient wellness (i.e., reduced medical costs) and increased adherence. Then, we conducted ecosystem analysis to understand individual players’ incentives, level of influence, and willingness to pay. Finally, we recommended a hybrid partnership model with multiple players to maximize value and hedge risk.

smart healthcare commercialization

The Solution

Stepping Stones to Progress

Next up: bringing the client team’s sponsors on board. The prospect of partnering with multiple players was understandably daunting, so we broke down a path forward for each relationship, starting with small, low-risk pilots and leveraging those to build influence.

The client came away with a clear vision of how to design their initial trials and assess the value of the outcomes to make a final determination about the future of the program.

Smart Healthcare

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