From Vial to Vein

Research, concepting, and roadmapping  to envision a Product Delivery System for a life-saving cell therapy treatment.

The world of biomedical innovation is advancing every day, opening up new and exciting opportunities to make a meaningful impact in healthcare. As part of a front-end discovery project, I partnered with a team of researchers and strategists to envision a product delivery system for a new rare-disease treatment coming to market. 

The first step to identifying insights and opportunities was to immerse ourselves in the world of rare diseases and their treatments. Our client's product was a life-saving treatment for a devastating disease: post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder. Although rare (effecting just over 6,000 patients globally), we quickly came to understand that diagnosis was a terminal, and current treatments were off-label and chancey.

We sought to understand the current flow of diagnosis and how the disease is treated, as well as current cell-therapy treatments that are now being introduced to market. In doing so, we started to build the value proposition for our client's new treatment: when all hope is lost, physicians may now have an effective on-label treatment to confidently prescribe. 

Through a series of workshops, the team helped our client define the goals for the program, and how our process would inform our work. The client had never undertaken ethnographic research before, and were looking to our team to create research assets, design activities, and document our findings. We targeted high-profile transplant centers in Europe, where the disease is most likely to be encountered, and who have a broader variety of insurance and approval measures.

Before taking off into the field, we developed our own hypotheses about what we would see, and used those to craft our interview guides, activities, and maps. 

The following weeks took us to top transplant centers in Europe, where we observed, gathered, and explored.

When we returned, we were ready to make sense of everything we saw through a formalized synthesis process.

We included client-side stakeholders in our synthesis weeks, an intensive time period where we holed up with tons of sticky notes, coffee, and whiteboards. We worked through what we had seen, breaking down our clients' preconceived notions and mapping out the ordering and delivery flows we had observed. Through iteration, together we crafted a list of Insights, backed up with our research.

Communicating our insights to the client team was crucial, as our research efforts represented a new discipline for them, and internal stakeholders were eager to understand our perspective in the space. We prepared documents that broke each Insight down, explaining context and including quotes we had heard from the field.

Additionally, I charted and designed Journey Maps of the diagnosis, ordering, and delivery process we had seen at the medical centers. In understanding how centers and care team operated, we were able to map out how the new treatment might fit into  their operations and processes. 

Calling out pain points helped the client understand where they might have the most impact, and where along the journey they could create moments of delight for their users.

Along with the more tangible reflections of what we had seen in field, we began to create concepts for the new treatment delivery experience. Our goal was to tell a story, helping our clients get excited about the impact they could have in the space, and make our ideas feel real. 

We reached out to our broader design team, bringing in groups to brainstorm around opportunity spaces. We then moved great ideas into sketches and storyboards. 

Alongside storyboarding our vision for the larger narrative, I took the reins translating those ideas into sketchy, conceptual screens. Our ideas for the overall experience translated into direct ordering and delivery system needs, which the client was able to understand at a high level be seeing system sketches early on.

Through our research and insights, we identified key themes and developed a set of design principles for the client to adopt and utilize internally. As the client moved forward and brought their treatment to market, these principles would guide their decision-making and serve as a gut-check for everything they developed.

To help keep them true to the principles, we designed a set of cards that would live in their office space, conferences rooms. 

We also designed a living journey map that charted out our collective vision for the treatment process. In addition to mapping out their users' experience, it showed the information flowing into their delivery system, internal actions and roles, the movement through the system, communication methods, and pivotal moments to design for.

Along with this process map, I developed low-fidelity wireframes that laid out information for key hero screens. The low fidelity allowed the client to evaluate hierarchy, navigation, and our proposed concepts, while still developing their internal thinking moving forward.

In order to help the client as they prepared to move into the next phase of development, I mapped out user flows for both the primary user group (the care teams) and the internal client-side admin teams. Through collaborative workshops with both the client and their new development partners, we identified which flows would be prioritized for their beta system.

As the next phase of development begins, we know that we provided our partners with a solid, research-backed foundation: for the decisions moving forward, for the standards set, and for the treatment vision.