Pharmacy Chain — Maya Kumaran

Hello, currently a Senior User Experience Designer at EY Design Studio, NYC.

With a foundation in strategy and expertise in visuals, I approach experience design from an integrated, cross-disciplinary perspective.

Selected Clients
BNY Mellon
Comcast
Fordham University
Morgan Stanley
Signet
Starbucks
Subway
Walgreens
etc.

Resume
LinkedIn
Contact

MAR 2023

ROLE
Industry Research
User Research
Persona Design
Service Blueprints

TIME
4 months

TOOLS
Miro
Figma
PowerPoint

One of the largest US drugstore chains wanted to expand their service offerings to provide holistic, trusted, healthcare to their patients, expanding beyond the traditional role of the pharmacy.

Building upon existing client services and solutions, we used Service Design to define an effective diabetes Chronic Conditions Management(CCM) program. Based on a deep understanding of all user groups, we developed a “now, next, beyond” solution to prioritize service interactions and capabilities needed along the customer journey.

CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

As the healthcare landscape shifts to patient-centered, preventative care, a leading drugstore chain needed to shift their model to drive patient outcomes. They wanted to play a more active role in wellness and disease prevention.

We assesseed their current offerings and developed a service blueprint and clinincal model to position the company as holistic community resource, not just a pharmacy. This would be used to drive the pharmacy’s strategic plan and capabilities.

01 RESEARCH
The first step in our process was to complete a comprehensive review of the client’s systems and services, stakeholder needs, and the healthcare/CCM landscape. This allowed us to identify the current state and map opportunities and gaps. Below is a summary of our research and synthesis:

Key Findings:
From our research, we were able to build guidelines around a good Diabetes CCM program:

Must drive patient health outcome across 3 areas: medication & therapy adherence, behavioral change & education, lifestyle measures & nutrition planning
The key to effective chronic condition management is to shift from acute and episodic interventions to proactive, patient-centered, and holistic care for the patient
An 8 Step Clinical Model drives all areas of a good Diabetes CCM program:

The 8 Step Clinical Model served as the foundation from which we developed our proposed Service Blueprint, and defined gaps & opportunities.

02 PERSONAS
Personas were created to better understand out patients and client stakeholder team.

Provisional Personas
In order to drive patient-centered, holistic care, we needed to develop a deep understanding out our patients. We built out a spectrum of 4 patient personas to define their respective behaviors and levels of condition management. These personas are illustrative, based on existing client research and patient stories from previous desk research.

Our 4 personas show personalization of services and capabilities to meet each patient where they’re at.

We also needed to consider the additional key players in the US healthcare system: payers, providers, pharma, and sales. Understanding each of these segments and how they work together was key to building out our future CCM program.

B2B Personas
We interviewed 18 members of the B2B Sales Team: the client user group responsible for gaining buy-in for the new CCM program. They were able to provide important context on why previous programs had been unsuccessful, and what the key elements were in creating a differentiating care program.

Snippet of our synthesis process following the interviews. We color-coded notes based on interviewee and clustered our findings into over-arching themes. We then began to form personas based on interviewees that shared similar activities and behaviors.

We then formed personas based on the interviewees that shared similar activities and behaviors. The key insights outlined in our personas informed future opportunities.

03 SERVICE BLUEPRINTWe returned to the previously defined 8 Step Clinical Model to map the holistic future Diabetes patient experience. At each stage, we outlined the key services/activities that needed to happen based on our previous research.

Next, we created variations our model to ensure we were tailing our care to each of our patient segments. This took the form of Service Blueprints specific to each of our user groups, from low risk to high risk.

04 NOW, NEXT, BEYOND

The last step in our process was to define the ‘Now, Next, and Beyond’ for our client in terms of what they needed to prioritize. This would serve as a roadmap to guide implementation through the next 2-5 years and beyond. We included both what our client already offered as well as the gaps they would need to close within each timeframe.

Now (fundamental): Baseline services and capabilities that are required to build out a good diabetes CCM program, such as medication review, testing, exams, and goal planning with patients

Next (enabling): Capabilities, tools, and technologies that enable and grow the client’s offerings, allowing the program to scale and mature appropriately. This segment focuses largely on tech capabilities and team members, such as integrated portals and consolidated scheduling.

Beyond (enhanced): These capabilities go beyond what is expected of a CCM program and would change the landscape for pharmacy. Pharmacists now play a larger role in clinical services and have a much more integral role in managing patient health. Customers trust the pharmacy for preventative services and testing, and payers rely on the pharmacy to be the pulse on population health.

CONCLUSION

Building out a highly technical program with broad health implications for the population required thorough knowledge of the industry and all key players. Because of this, we advocated for primary research as much as possible, as well as deep review of existing industry knowledge. However, due to the time and expense that one-on-one interviews require, we had to strongly advocate for the benefits to ensure we were able to get the information we needed. By ensuring the client understood the value of conducting direct research with stakeholders, we were able to successfully generate and validate a holistic, comprehensive, diabetes chronic conditions management program.

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MAYALKUMARAN@GMAIL.COM
914-703-0892