Saludsa Contigo - Healthcare Service

New Digital Healthcare service focused on improve cronical patients lifestyle.

Project Background

At Saludsa, with data we identified that two diagnosis were the more impactful to our costs: Diabetes and Hypertension.

With this information we look at the necessity to look into new options for our clients with this diagnosis to give them better treatments and keep their diagnosis under control and how we can also prevent that more clients can develop this illness.

Methodologies implemented

Interviews

At the discovery phase, I conducted two kind of interviews in order to get a better understanding of which were the main needs they have, focused on one side with medical professionals and in a second space, interviews with patients with this diagnosis.

Why did I choose this research method?

I think this was an important method for this process to understand better their lifestyle, which kind of medical risk do they have, what they can and can't do and how this kind of illness can be prevented.

What were the research questions?

The question bank was focused on getting cualitative information that could help us to have a better idea of our persona.

How many users were interviewed?

The interviews were done to 2 doctors: one endocrinologist and one family doctor, who are the ones that treat this illnesses. On the other side, I conducted interviews with six patients with this illnesses, 3 with diabetes and 3 with hypertension. My main goal was to identify which were their main challenges living with this illnesses and which were their main needs that with their actual service their weren't getting.

What were the main insights got from the interviews?

With this interviews, my main insights were:

They have to go every month for their continuous medicine to the drugstore.
They don't have mental health support with their actual plans, but it would be an important plus for improve their lifestyle due to secondary reactions they could have with their illnesses.
They don't have nutricionist support with their actual plans, but it would be an important plus for improve their lifestyle.
5/6 of the interviews agree that they take care of the food that thay consume, but they would like to have more information about how they can have options that improve their relationship with food.
They would like to have an incentive plan that motivates them to improve their lifestyle.

Service Blueprint

To understand how customers find and interact with the service which we created and what do we need to have in mind in our front stage and backstage processes to ensure that we have clear everything that is needed.

With this tool we identify that there were online processes and offline processes where our customer will be informed and will use the service.

The main pain point identified was the enrollment to the service, which for a first experiment we did it through calls and after identify many issues with the contactability and how our enrolled customers process the information of the benefit through the call.

This service has cyclical periods because there are things as the communication with informative blogs on how they can have a better lifestyle or how they can take advantage of the service through the App Saludsa to use their benefits.

At the beginning this process was focused to also have a doctor who will make track of the patient, but during our first experiments, we defined that this was something that was causing pains to our customers so we take this out of our service. Despite this, we kept giving telemedicine service through our mobile application where they got attention not just with doctors, but with nutritionists, health coaches and trainers.

User Testing

Before launching the final product, I did some testing rounds in order to reveal possible problems.

We were aiming to identify if all the benefits established for the initial service, were interesting and aligned to the needs of our customers, for that we started to do some experiments with customers who were aware that this was a beta testing to get thier perceptions.

Our test subjects were 20 customers with this illnesses, which were part of the 3 experiments that were done.

Thus rounds of experiments led us to take out many initial benefits, as the health tracking with doctors with a telemedicine tool that we already had at our disposal, but that at the end of it, our customers didn't want to feel pressured, they wanted freedom to use the benefit.

Also another important insight make us take the decision to change our medicine providers due to the satisfaction of our customers before launching the service.

Our
Results

I think that the biggest lessons that we got from this process was: give more freedom to use the benefits to our users,
Give more freedom to use the benefits to our users, to motivate them to have their exams and doctor follow ups through incentives.
The best ways to enroll this kind of patients is a mixed strategy, focused not just in virtual channels, but to have also traditional channels as the telephone, for our older customers, which are many of our patients with this diagnosis.

$18

Savings for the company per patient in the program

3500

customers self-registered on the service

92%

of satisfaction