How Indian Health-Tech Startups can Innovate with Design Thinking
It goes without saying — over the last few years, the health startup ecosystem in India has driven immense innovation. As technology for health burgeons in India, so does the startup ecosystem around it, which has led to the rise of accelerator and incubator programs to further accelerate innovation and address glaring gaps and challenges in the space. In order to build remarkable health products, there is a need for the ecosystem to evolve to connect with startups and users’ needs today.
Technology for Health in India: Challenges & Opportunities
The big opportunity for startups working on innovative product and service delivery models in healthcare is to tap the user base that falls in the lower quartiles of the country. These are users living and working in contexts quite different from the urban metropolises where we have seen much of the innovation happen in the last decade. Their access to different levels of healthcare services (primary, secondary and tertiary) is far more limited compared to their urban counterparts.
Technology for health is still a new interaction that users are not accustomed to — the comfort and trust of meeting a physician in person is hard to replace. To add to it, ancillary services (lab testing, imaging, etc.) are expensive. As an underinsured segment, the affordability of quality healthcare services remains out of reach of most.
“For organisations taking on the challenge of developing services for this underserved segment, it is imperative that they develop an intimate understanding of context, beliefs, attitudes and their needs which will need to be serviced in equally unique ways. Learning through experimentation and iteration is a necessary process that organisations will need to embrace to deliver value and experiences that matter”, said Ayush Chauhan, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Quicksand
Design Thinking for the Health Startup Ecosystem
Design, therefore, becomes an essential part of the toolset that startups need to cultivate. Embedding design thinking as a core value at the early stages of enterprise creation is the only way to build an organisational culture that puts customer/user experience as a non negotiable throughout the journey of product and service development.
“It doesn’t matter what you are trying to build, you are likely to have a few opportunities to think afresh — test your assumptions about the user, your operations, and your team. Design thinking allows you to do that — think about basics, scan the ecosystem, and look within and bring it all together as a coherent offering that is desirable, feasible, and sustainable. Even if you fail along the way, you will know exactly why and how you failed and get a chance to improve. Managing products, services, and organisations is often a lifelong journey, and design thinking is the kind of process that prioritises meaning, learning, and experimentation over success at any cost”, said Rishabh Sachdeva, Principal, Quicksand
Our proposition with a design-led incubator is based on this philosophy. Right from product development and prototyping support to enabling organisations to develop a sensibility for good design that manifests across all touch points, we need to put in place support systems to enable startups to build, grow and thrive.
In 2018, Quicksand undertook a public health project to imagine the future of women’s contraception and conducted extensive research in Kenya and India to uncover unmet needs for contraception use. The findings were leveraged using human-centered design methodologies to facilitate insight-driven ideation for generating new product ideas. The focus of the project was on innovating products rooted in user insights and needs, their contexts and realities and how that could dramatically improve the contraceptive experience.
More recently, with the ongoing WhatsApp Incubator Program (WIP) — an initiative to facilitate positive and measurable health outcomes using the WhatsApp Business Platform — which is being administered and implemented by Quicksand Design Studio, the aim is to;
- Provide hands-on technology, design, business planning, go-to-market and evaluation and learning support for startups looking to build innovative health products for the base and middle of the pyramid
- Tweak the product development process to incorporate user research, testing and co-creation as an integral part
- Build the organisational muscle for prototyping and experimentation
- Develop a sensibility for sound user-centered design that manifests across all touch points with the end user and other stakeholders
“With the WhatsApp Incubator Program, it has been particularly inspiring to see participating organisations address key inefficiencies in health systems and create opportunities for behaviour change. Armed with the right resources, technology and tools, as well as mentorship from leading experts, the cohort of 10 organisations are now in a unique position to drive meaningful and impact-driven change and create market-ready solutions using WhatsApp for Business”, added Ayush Chauhan
The Power of Technology, Human-Centered Design and User-Centricity
Increasingly, technology, human-centered design and user-centricity have proved more important than ever to tackle critical health issues — themes which have been central to the idea behind the WhatsApp Incubator Program as well as the commitment that these organisation bring to their ventures. Whether it is bridging the gap between patient and doctors during postoperative care, providing more accessible and interactive counseling to expecting mothers or connecting young girls to health services for improving sexual and reproductive health — these user needs have to be addressed through a careful and sensitive enquiry into the unique constraints and limitations of the relevant target users.
As an industry, there is a dire need to break away from traditional approaches and put digital transformation front and center to truly redefine health-tech in India. At the same time providers need to be careful not to treat technology as an end in itself. As an ecosystem, India is buzzing with many products and services on the horizon. And, as the ecosystem evolves, it is important to nurture and add value to companies which can further enrich our lives.
Quicksand is a design research and innovation consultancy based in India, facilitating the creation of meaningful experiences. Over the years, our work has embedded us in sectors as varied as finance, public health, water and sanitation, consumer goods, education, new media and technology.
