Echos worked with one of the world’s largest and oldest – founded in the 1800’s – multinational medical devices, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods manufacturing company to help them foster innovation through a more comprehensive care-service during treatment of patients that suffer from Multiple Myeloma, a terminal type of cancer.
The Challenge
To design a service experience that better supports and cares for Multiple Myeloma patients during their treatment journey.
The Outcome
Echos came up with a solution that was called “The Diary Guide”. The Diary Guide helped elderly patients to keep track of their disease whilst informing family and health providers of their progress, symptoms, relapses and remissions.
Contextualising The Problem
This pharmaceutical giant approached Echos to help them use innovation as a way to accelerate change and create a better service experience for their clients. Echos’ Design Thinking approach was well received and executed by the company, who have a history of being prone to human-centred approaches in their processes.
Sensemaking
From the outset, Echos and the client’s marketing team worked together very closely and understood that the betterment of the service depended on the relationship between patient and nurses, as they are the ones responsible for administering treatment in hospitals or clinics.
The process started by performing a comprehensive empathetic research and in-depth analysis, which began by understanding the patient’s’ condition and how it affected their lives and proceeded further by exploring the patients’ surrounding support ecosystem – which included caregivers, doctors, nurses, family members, etc.
The identified pattern stated that patients interacted with each of the people in their ecosystem in a different location: doctors, nurses, relatives were all located in different geographical places, which made the patient the key – and only – information holder of important facts that would impact their treatment. This was not an ideal scenario since many patients struggled with memory loss due to their debilitation by disease or old age.
Such realisation brought the Echos’ team to a conclusion: the real weakness in the treatment process was the fact the people in the patient ecosystem did not interact amongst themselves.
Echos understood that it was necessary to engage everyone that was part of the ecosystem in communication by connecting nurses with doctors, relatives, caregivers and, of course, the patient, as a way to make all information existent available and, as a result, improve the patient’s life.
From problem to solution
Echos’ team collaborated with different stakeholders – doctors, nurses, patients and caregivers – and came up with over one hundred possible solutions to resolve our client’s initial problem. Out of those, in 2014, the client’s marketing team selected the three solutions they recognised as having the potential to be most impactful and the Echos’ team started to prototype each one of those services.
The chosen solution was simple to implement: a diary in which patients centralised and kept all of the information from all of their interactions during treatment.
Solution
The Diary Guide helped guide and offer a safer and more pleasant journey for patients who suffered from Multiple Myeloma. It also started to serve as a record that became essential for future research on treatments and dosages for specific medicines during treatment of the disease. Some patients also used the diary as a way to share their journey and leave a documented legacy to the world.
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