Service Design | User Research
Team: Anisha, Esha, Komal, Kyle, Shruti, Yvonne
Role: Research, Service Design, Strategy
Timeline: August 23 - October 23
Mentor: Nicolas Rebolledo
Partners: Royal College of Art
A case study of Babylon Health and what can businesses like it do to make it meaningful through a user-centred approach rather than just being about the market demand.
Their Story
Context
Babylon Health is a Telehealth startup that promises 24/7 affordable and convenient healthcare, mainly focussing in primary care. It has been a digital health service provider that combines an artificial intelligence enabled platform with virtual clinical operations for patients. Patients are connected with health care professionals through their web/ mobile based application.
Babylon Health was founded in 2013 by Ali Parsa in London, a British-Iranian ex-banker, with an aim of making healthcare freely and easily available to everyone, starting with something as basic as providing people with the opportunity to connect with doctors through video calls.It grew by picking up contracts with NHS and British health insurance providers. However, their value came to be seen through their grand ambition of adding an AI-powered symptom checker to help speed up &/or automate diagnoses.
What DID they provide?
What Babylon promised:
Video appointments with GP in < 2hours
Symptoms checker, AI chatbot
In-person clinic checkups
Healthcheck (syncing devices, monitor and prediction through AI)
babylon health’s business model
Their subscription based model was launched in the UK in 2013, after which they expanded to 17 countries including Rwanda and the United States. The company was covering over 20 million people with a promise of 5000 consultations per day. In November of 2017, Babylon launched its free at the point-of-care, NHS funded service.
However, Babylon health went bankrupt in August of 2023, selling their business to eMed.
The business problem ANALYSIS
They raised money based on tech that was not fully developed/ The product was not really tested with users/ they should have tested their ideas in order to avoid breaking the bank.
Expanded their suite of partners to other countries with different healthcare systems where the same solution might not necessarily work.
Had a very narrow customer segment / used and applied the same business proportion for multiple populations / customer segment was not clear.
Underestimated demand for doctors within their target audience / Demand - supply issue for doctor-patient demographic.
Surge in patients due to covid - led to inaccurate estimation of business.
They did not really think what health-seekers attach value to? Were more focussed on introducing AI rather than using AI for the right purpose.
They didn't really identify the problem that needed to be solved through AI. Instead of humanising the experience they dehumanised it.
OUR APPROACH
RESEARCH
We did a stakeholder map to analyse how their system was working, and our biggest takeaway was - that the NHS was trying to leverage Babylon Health-like services as digital extensions to their healthcare system.
JOURNEY MAPPING + SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Following that we did the user journey map for health seekers to help us understand their experiences and also did a service blueprint to understand the backstage process.
We conducted user interviews with healthcare seekers and healthcare professionals to discover what is working and what is not working from their POV, to help us gather insights.
KEY FINDINGS (OBservation —> INSIGHTS)
What’s working, what’s not working
After going through our desk research, primary research and out reflections, we converted our observations into insights.
Looking at the bigger picture
We tried to revisit the Digital Healthcare / Telemedicine system as an area of opportunity to inform our point of view.
Post understanding the service and the user experience, we zoomed out to see the bigger picture of digital healthcare & telemedicine.
Which led us to thinking -
How do we humanise digital healthcare? - we realised the importance of physical presence and assurance is in the healthcare sector.
How do we scale with nuanced needs? - the medical sector caters to a variety of different people and health issues, which makes it difficult to scale for all.
How do healthcare systems adapt to change? - the medical field has a lot of dependencies, and changing anything can have a very large impact, how do we make this easier?
PROBLEM STATEMENT
how might we?
How might we bring more awareness, trust and inclusivity in telemedicine to achieve a seamless and supportive healthcare journey?
What’s needed?
TRANSPARENCY
Decreasing the medical anxiety that health seekers face by making the health seeker’s as well as the health provider’s journey more transparent
COMPASSION
To have emotional-supportive tone of voice across platforms to bring more compassion towards health-seekers’ journey.
INCLUSIVE
Have multiple touch-points and more visual cues to cater to diverse users’ health consultation journey.
INCREASING INTEGRATION
Tying the fragmented pieces of the user’s health journey under one umbrella
REDUCING REDUNDANCY
To lessen the redundancy involved in the journey of health-seeker with long-term conditions.
SERVICE CONCEPT PROPOSAL
What can the future look like?
A Citymapper-like health routing service, integrated with the NHS, that provides different pathways to fulfil your health requirements and tracks your journey to achieve a seamless and supportive experience. 🎯
SUMMARY
While the project came to a conclusion, the project helped me reflect on my design process and the responsibilities that come with being a designer. While we were analysing the business of Babylon health it helped us think of what the future of digital health should or could be like? especially when it comes to designing for an audience in the healthcare space, where the needs can be very particular. To analyse how a major service like Babylon could fall in a span of few years due to lack of user-centricity was very interesting and helped me realise the potential and impact of human-centered design. How would have the service functioned had they started with the user and not the market? How would they have made the services better to help people rather than rushing to scale the business? What does healthcare mean to an individual rather than a system?
Working with my tutor and teammates was greatly based on our interest in looking at the healthcare system in general. We conducted workshops and tutorials which helped us streamline and look at the problem through a different lens, especially the one in the future. This helped me understand the importance of critical thinking, rethinking, creative explorations and examination of an existing problem.
Throughout the project engaging with industry experts, healthcare professionals, healthcare seekers helped us dive deeper into thr problem that exist within healthcare, more to be considered as wicked problems. Overall, I understand my responsibilities as a designer to adher to values that can help design services to drive a positive impact on the society as a whole.