Case Study
Nomi Health
Reinventing the healthcare journey for addressing preventative care.
Nomi Health is a direct healthcare company successfully rewiring how healthcare is delivered and paid for in America, to the benefit of patients, providers, and the buyers of healthcare in both the public and private sectors.
Our project seeks to understand the current landscape for individuals with employer-based health insurance.
We focused on the under-studied beginning phase of the user journey before someone feels sick and
needs to utilize health care.
Team: Divya, Ashlyn, Mirna, Philip, & Emily
Project info: Capstone 2022 (four months), Master of Design focused in Health Program at The University of Texas at Austin
My Role: As the project manager and design strategist: Led, conceptualized, and designed the research and prototype activity boards, and facilitated the activities. Managed the project requirements like research consent forms, gift card forms, and collaboration with the finance team to document and distribute the gift cards by maintaining the logs and excel spreadsheets. Developed a user journey map at the start of the project as a standing document to follow up throughout the process. Designed the final Reward card visuals. Collaborated with the team in conceptualizing and creating a research strategy, iterations, and decision-making process for the stages of the project. Facilitated presentations, studio times and visual styles, organized documents, and took responsibility for submissions and deadlines.
The Challenge
The complexity of healthcare system is confusing to us as educators, future providers, and consumers. It’s also reactionary to health events instead of preventative measures. These reactionary factors lead to undesired downstream effects: costly care and poor health.
How might we create a unified experience that supports people in navigating and managing their health journey from the start?
Our Approach
Building equitable futures in healthcare
1. Design Research
In order to conduct effective contextual field research, our approach was to apply equity-centred practices and
techniques throughout the research process. We aimed to understand aspects of the beginning stages of the healthcare journey before an encounter with a healthcare provider. I designed a standing journey map for field activities to gather behavioural data for big-picture insights and to understand the needs of the user throughout the journey.
Our research goal was to understand the positive and negative touch-points of the users before receiving healthcare services. Understand the power dynamics and decision-making processes between stakeholders during the beginning stage of the healthcare journey. And understand how people perceive their health plan’s involvement or lack thereof in their overall health.
2. Sensemaking
We explored key trends, patterns, and themes that helped us learn more about our primary stakeholders. We further organized the data, insights, and findings through affinity, and journey map. We practiced building empathy for your community stakeholder to understand the community stakeholder's current experience.
Through our research methods, we heard many stories about the healthcare journeys of our participants. The following insights are derived from the patterns we heard throughout those experiences like how people develop their understanding of health plans, how they seek the care when need it, and lastly how they plan for healthy futures.
3. Opportunities
We created a system map to visualize the complexities and uncover opportunities for ideating possible solutions. First, we established key attributes from our findings and grouped them together by common themes. The areas that we focused on were ‘insurance policies’, ‘consumer experience with other insurance ’, ‘patient experience when seeking healthcare’, ‘Impact on Health’, and ‘seeking preventative healthcare.’
We found that participants would wait for symptoms to get worse before seeking care, due to anxiety. These feelings resulted from a lack of price transparency and, only increased the fear of cost and the existing lack of motivation to seek care.
4. Prototype & Co-creation
We started ideating around how do we make the healthcare process simple and accessible. Out of all the iterations, we prototyped two of them on the two opportunity areas mentioned above. The first one is Nomi Reward Card. The concept of the reward card is to encourage users to seek preventative care by incentivizing engagement and providing them with simple navigation throughout the process. Nomi reward card will be different than other reward cards as it can be used as a debit card. But instead of the user putting money into it, they can claim it when they practice preventative care. And this card can be used in any grocery, pharmacy or for online payments. Though It will not be valid for the purchase of illicit drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and more.
To design for better behaviour we thought why not use this prototype to co-create and develop the design with the users, go deeper and understand their current behaviour and lifestyles.
5. Future Vision
In a world where the realities of being an adult are increasingly complex, it’s easy to see why learning about insurance in order to seek preventative health takes a back seat for twenty-somethings. This gave us one last idea to share that could “help people practice seeking preventative care for better life-long health.” We believe that Nomi can get ahead of this problem by starting including the adolescents on their health plan in organization of thier own health.
We know that it takes decades to really get a handle on health insurance, so what if we can start that experience earlier. What if by the time someone turns 26 and really has to take on responsibility for their own health, they already have decade or more of experience under their belt because Nomi recognized the importance of including teens as in their platform. The combination of the responsibility to make appointments for themselves and ability to get rewards for doing so could build preventative health habits to last a lifetime.
The healthcare system can be changed as a result of players like Nomi and others who make seeking preventative care rewarding, second-nature, and accessible to young people in a better way.