Rethinking Healthcare

Gila Corem
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

This week we got the following email…

It’s an invitation by Teva, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, to participate in a competition to envision the next thing in medical and healthcare. If you’re interested, take a look here.

We thought this would be the perfect example to include in our project: “It’s broken!”

So, over the next several weeks we’re going to describe the process we’ve started on how to design and create a new healthcare solution. It’s important to say we do not have an existing solution in mind. Not even an idea. We’re starting from scratch by understanding the problem.

The Problem

The Rise program provided a list of a few sample challenges:

It’s immediately visible that Teva (as are other drug companies) is mostly interested in chronic diseases. Drug companies realize that curing diseases is not profitable, and it makes more financial sense to turn a physical conditions into a chronic disease which in turn builds a long-term dependency between a patient and the drug / treatment. Morally, that’s bad…but it’s also not a problem for the drug companies to fix. Instead, healthcare systems, insurance companies, and government policy should address this problem.

From the list we chose the Digital Health Challenge which is a very broad topic. We looked into the most common chronic diseases and found a very long list that includes, among others: heart diseases, diabetes, obesity, authorities, obesity, depression, high cholesterol and more. We chose a problem that all too many people suffer from: back pain.

What happens when you cannot move

We looked into this problem and realized, back pain has three stages:
1. Prevention: before the pain starts, the most cost-efficient stage of treatment, but also the hardest because there isn’t a problem yet, no pain means no motivation to change behavior
2. Treatment: when pain is evident, expensive and frustrating, most patients subscribe to every form of treatment that can help
3. Rehabilitation: after the pain is gone, back function needs to be restored back to normal and the next episode must be prevented

Each one of these stages of the disease holds a great opportunity for a product that can transform people’s lives.

So how do we choose which path to follow?

The simple answer is by talking with users that suffer or suffered from back pain. This is going to be the next step and we’ll tell you all about it in the next story.

Nukadima

An innovation catalyst committed to bringing world-changing ideas to life.

Gila Corem

Written by

Product manager and UX designer.

Nukadima

Nukadima

An innovation catalyst committed to bringing world-changing ideas to life.

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