Migraine Patient Support Program
Cross-channel patient support program for patients diagnosed with severe migraines to enhance quality of life and encourage adherence to a new biologic treatment. This program included supports for those seeking diagnosis, personalization for holistic treatment plans, treatment onboarding and dosage reminders, migraine prediction & monitoring, and lifestyle supports to aid in managing/ coping with migraines. I was responsible for generative research, service design strategy and conceptual design of this program.
My responsibilities:
Generative research
Service strategy
Conceptual service design & testing
Project length:
14 weeks
+2.2M
Modelled increase in diagnoses as a result of program by 2023
+14pp
Predicted increase in treatment adherence after 1 year
$900M
Increased revenue resulting from program by 2023
1.2M
Active patients receiving treatment by 2023
Context
People affected by severe migraines often feel like hostages to their condition. They often go un- or under-diagnosed and are dismissed as "just headaches” by many, meaning affected individuals suffer without support. Migraines can spring on them with little to no notice, forcing them to miss important work and personal commitments, debilitating them with brutal physical symptoms. While new biologic drugs provide significant relief, they do not completely eliminate migraines and demand strict adherence to complex dosing schedules, challenging consistent treatment.
We were asked to create a series of concepts for a patient support program to be launched alongside a new biologic drug. To help my design process, I created the following questions after interviewing stakeholders:
How might we increase rates and accuracy of diagnoses for migraines?
How might we help patients understand the new drug and how it fits into a broader set of treatment and management activities?
How might we improve adherence to treatment for patients prescribed this new drug?
How might we support patients in more effectively coping with migraines when they do strike, to improve quality of life beyond what the drug can achieve on its own?
Concept
I created 14 different concepts (4 shown above) that leveraged connection/integration with insurer care platforms, smart home and other automation technologies, and third-party service providers to respond to each of the above questions. The ultimate output of this work took several forms, including:
An immersive website documenting the target future state experience for the patient support program
Concept cards with key experiential requirements and insights from concept testing with patients
5-year horizon-based development and delivery roadmap, anchored in business model and identified core value pools
Our immersive website tracked the journeys of several hypothetical patients as they navigated their diagnosis and treatment within our proposed patient support program. Each “Signature moment” was linked to one or more of six core enabling capabilities, which were the focus of the business plan.
Work plan & approach
With a relatively tight timeline, we adopted a 2-week “sprint” cadence across two interconnected workstreams - the patient-centric service design and a complementary business model design.
How I delivered impact
Thinking in systems: Expanding impact by considering holistic patient circle of care
Through generative research, I identified several ways in which patients’ extended circles of care failed to engage with them in a timely and context-aware manner, causing delays in diagnosis, treatment, and comfort in managing migraines when they struck. These included:
Employers and insurers failing to identify or appropriately respond to patterns in sick days, resulting in delayed diagnoses and often unfair penalties to the patient
Doctors underestimating the severity of symptoms given the absence or informality of logged incidents and the typically gendered experience of migraines, resulting in chronic under-diagnosis
Family members, caregivers, and service providers missing signs that a patient is experiencing a migraine, resulting in inadvertent harm by inflicting bright lights, noises, motion, etc.
Commitments or obligations of patients being unmet because their circle of care wasn’t aware of them, resulting in patients no longer taking on those commitments and slowly becoming more isolated (a pernicious positive feedback loop, as isolation reduces the strength of the circle of care further, making it more likely that the patient will miss more obligations, driving further isolation)
By considering these as components of a system, I was able to ideate concepts that would assert new connections and influence the feedback between elements. Moreover, I was better able to explain how seemingly tangential features like IoT integration with smart home products could have a downstream effect on adherence to a treatment regime, enabling more accurate business case development and more fulsome business support for these elements of the patient support platform.
Pragmatic foresight: Balancing near-term and future opportunities
We aimed to create a viable patient support program to coincide with a new treatment launch. Beyond the initial program, however, I encouraged the client to explore additional capabilities. I presented research on migraine prediction and examples from other health areas, like hypertension and diabetes, where wearables benefit patients and research. This drove interest in a migraine predictor, granting us license to test concepts with patients and model business impacts of such a tool. Although not yet feasible, this groundwork led to client investment in future R&D.
Quantified impact: Collaborative business model development
In collaboration with a business analyst, I evaluated the impact of key features for a patient support program, considering behavioural outcomes, technical and operational feasibility, and additional value opportunities like third-party partnerships. Through sessions with client’s tech and operations heads, and consultations with experts, we grounded our feature impact estimates, bolstering the client’s confidence to fund features with longer release timelines.