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Ensuring drug delivery innovation solves future oriented needs through co-creative foresight

How to embed future patient needs in near-term action

Services

Strategic foresight

Design thinking

Co-creation

Challenge

Our client, a global biotech launching a first-in-class treatment to help patients live with a chronic disease and manage episodic attacks, was proactively investing in drug delivery innovation to improve patient experience. As device innovation can take many years to develop and approve, it was critical to ensure we were solving for conditions patients may face in 5 years and avoid launching a device that would be obsolete on arrival. For this to be successful collaboration across a broad range of partners was required. This included designing patient and customer experience, technical development, regulatory approach, and even coordinating with a partner pharma who was launching in global markets. Establishing a robust vision would require balancing all stakeholder perspectives with a strong provocation of what patients’ lives in the future might entail.

Approach

Getting Out of the Bubble

From kick-off, we inspired our clients to quickly immerse in the future state. We achieved this through provocative interviews with futurists and rapid synthesis of available ethnographic research into trends and future scenarios.

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Patient Behavior Trends

Together with the client core team, we identified a range of emergent patient behaviours that we believed would be influential in expectations and access to care. In parallel we developed a range of trends that spanned the therapeutic area, care providers, and non-healthcare factors, exploring ideas of how these could impact successful adoption and implementation of device innovation.

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Co-creating the Future

We designed and facilitated a highly dynamic co-creative program with all stakeholders that included a deep-dive into future trends and drivers, emergent patient behaviours, and practical solution development. Throughout the program we continually reflected on how best to solve problems of tomorrow based on insights of today, and generated design briefs for three device innovations, supporting services, and an access strategy.

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Impact

Enduring Design Briefs

In less than three months we generated timely provocations as input for multiple workstreams, including: device development, patient insights, regulatory and access. Co-created design briefs were developed into a central roadmap, guiding cross-functional workstreams and providing a single source of truth for prioritization of efforts.

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Device Innovation

Emergent patient behaviors led to distinct design criteria that have been integrated into device design and development, while a new patient support service was launched to support immediate needs of patients. Final support included developing tools future workstreams to utilize so that they could future-proof their go-to-market activities and outputs.

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