What would you do if the patient were sitting across the table?
That’s the question that took center stage at Slalom’s recent roundtable event with the CEO of Akili Interactive, Eddie Martucci.
Akili launched the first prescription digital therapeutic, EndeavorRx®, a videogame for children with ADHD. We had an engaging audience with a diverse attendance from start-ups to established pharma players.
Even though patient-centered care delivery has been gaining traction over the past few decades, patients are often engaged very late in the design of healthcare solutions. When you think of traditional therapeutics, it’s hard to understand how to incorporate the voice of patients when developing such therapies. But in the case of building engaging digital therapeutics, experience design needs to meet medicine from inception.
Digital therapeutics provide us the opportunity to put the patient and their needs at the center of our efforts by enabling us to step in their shoes, see and listen to their world, and experience the environment they live in. An organization that does this well is Akili Interactive.
Key takeaways that illuminate what we learned during this roundtable:
- Redefining the experience of medicine for patients takes courage and design-focused action. Build medicine for the ‘moment of experience’, such that the patient might forget they’re using a medicine, even for a moment, in a visceral way.
- Focus on science and patient experience at the same time. They both weigh equally. Organizations must invest, build, and grow both simultaneously.
- Appropriate expectations need to be set when it comes to managing the FDA around approval pathways. The software elements that belong to patient experience can be iterated in an agile manner whereas the core algorithm (‘the science’) will need to be more consistent. Organizations must bring the FDA along the journey with them and consider them partners in the solution. Involve high-level decision-makers in the conversation. The FDA wants to hear from manufacturers and work together to pave a path for these emerging innovative therapeutics.
- Treat patients as people. Getting to know their journey can help keep them engaged throughout the product development process.
- Let patients decide what they want to do with their data. It is important to clearly state upfront why and what data is being collected. Providing the opportunity for the patient to voice their approval is paramount.
- Prioritize patients first when managing multiple stakeholders in the ecosystem. After that, it depends on the order of operations.
Following our Q&A with Eddie, we convened with leaders across 30 companies to take a deeper look at what’s getting in their way of being patient-centric. Small or large, the sentiments were similar, and we noticed the following themes:
- Cross-functional teams have a hard time speaking the same language. For example, product development, technical, and legal teams may not be on the same page.
- Some leaders have not considered diving deep into the patient’s environment. Thinking about the world of a patient by stepping in their shoes is not a common approach yet.
- There are so many bets on the table. Evaluating and prioritizing bets can be a challenge.
- Continuously balancing speed with doing the right thing is also a challenge.
To address the above themes, we asked “what would happen if patients were sitting across from the decision table?”
Would we still face the same challenges and not be able to successfully communicate with each other? How could one truly learn about a patient’s day-to-day experience versus making assumptions based on their disease?
We believe this is where experience design meets medicine.
Successful digital therapeutic companies focus on the impact to customers and the market in a dramatic way and they shape an innovative business model to support that approach.
Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to a couple more organizations doing magnificent work to keep up with the latest developments in Digital therapeutics — Digital Therapeutics Alliance and Digital Medicine Society!
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Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Our healthcare and life sciences industry teams partner with healthcare, biotech, and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.
