Designing patient-centric health services and technologies

Healthcare is in a period of incredible transformation. With changing competencies, shifting pressures, and changing beliefs, disruption is coming from everywhere.

Those who are embracing change and focusing on value for the full ecosystem of patients, payers, and players will have the most impact. Those who are reluctant to change will miss out on the opportunity to transform care as we know it.

IC/ health is a design team challenging conventional thinking in healthcare. We approach design with a systemic view on today’s needs and tomorrow’s possibilities in order to create programs, services, and technologies that improve both quality of life and the bottom line. At the same time, we reconnect organizations to their roots of care by bringing them closer to those that they serve. Our approach brings together medical anthropologists, designers, and health experts to gather stories of human experience, translate the complexities of those stories into usable tools, uncover valuable opportunities for design, and execute commercially sound business solutions.

We are guided by three key principles:

Create solutions that deliver value for people, payers, and our clients.

Collaborate with organizations who are authentically working to improve care.

Connect people with their own personal missions in health.

Discover. Uncover the experiences of health and wellbeing

How do people, practitioners, pharmacists, payers, pharma, and broader social or cultural issues contribute to the experience of health and wellbeing? At IC/ health, we help organizations answer these questions to deliver greater value for those experiencing and delivering care. By conducting world-class fieldwork and synthesis, our findings are translated into tangible strategy, planning, and designed tools. We bring the lived experience to life through insights books, Patient Journey Maps, breakpoints, and design principles.

We conduct primary ethnographic research to understand the lived experiences of health and wellness; we translate insights into actionable design tools.

We run primary interviews with practitioners, payers, advocacy groups, and administrators to understand the health experiences that affect quality of care.

We co-create by conducting collaborative design sessions.

We bring the experiences of health to life through powerful workshops, delivering insights that are relevant and actionable.

Develop. Identify and solve the right problems

We help our clients identify the right problems to solve, empowering them with the value propositions, business cases, and design concepts needed to socialize opportunities internally and externally. Our highly engaging deliverables—including Inspiration Scans, Opportunity Maps, and Concepts—equip our clients to stimulate imaginations, influence opinion, and inspire action.

We incubate with you, bringing you in-house to work with the Idea Couture team to define clear value propositions and business cases.

We scale existing in-house solutions to resolve new problems in a cost-effective way.

We employ strategic foresight, identifying the key drivers and trends influencing our strategies.

We develop business models to define new applications and opportunities for existing technologies.

Deliver. Implement sustainable healthcare solutions

Ensuring that the human insights and value propositions that we have developed are authentically represented in the final solution, we produce technically-feasible prototypes and support the launch of solutions. Our final designs are creative and compliant, and they deliver impact.

We prototype; our internal design studios (industrial, graphic, digital, service, engineering) bring concepts to life in support of learning objectives and downstream development.

We provide design validation by conducting experience and usability assessments of our solutions with patients and/or HCPs.

We help identify the path to market, including documentation, test plans, materials sourcing, and partnerships.

We’re different

With a team that includes PhD-level medical anthropologists, former pharma professionals, and experts in design for complex healthcare environments, we know what it takes to deliver valuable healthcare solutions.

We practice value-based design, focusing our design efforts in ways that are important to both our clients and those in need of care.

We immerse you in the design experience, letting you see and make sense of the needs of the people you’re serving.

We design with you in mind, proactively managing challenges we know you’ll face and partnering with you to take ideas all the way to the in-market finish line.

We understand and act on the realities of working with complex global health and wellness organizations.

We work with the best