The Future of Healthcare Memo
The future of personalized Healthcare will be integrated with everyday devices, ranging from smartphones, laptops, smart televisions, and video conferences devices (e.g., Zoom, Portal, Alexa Echo) to apps like Strava, FitBit, Alexa, or Apple Fitness+.
The goal of future healthcare services will be to innovate towards greater consumer accessibility and impactful preventative care at more economical price points. To make future services scaleable and affordable, the recombination of smart devices, machine learning, and AI needs will be critical.
Human-centric design, the recombination of existing technologies, and AI will invite more companies and services to increase healthcare accessibility with minimal effort from consumers. We can imagine automated appointment scheduling, and checkups follow-ups, or preventative care tips from your doctor (Human or AI) beaming to your smartphone while on the way to your local coffee shops, like an in-app notification from Netflix’s latest series or a work ping from a colleague to grab another coffee.
However, with personalization and cross-device integrations, there will be pitfalls. Integration and the subsequent data collection create hurdles related to consumer trust and privacy concerns. This is where design thinking can also play a critical role in the back-end design of products.
Design thinking can build products that leverage less data and offer more value to consumers by being thoughtful in data collection and usage. In other words, shift the strategy away from collecting everything about the consumer and focus on maximizing value with as little effort to personalize their experience.
Dieter Ram’s ten principles of good design can impact better data collection and consumer privacy design. In short, Less is Better for data collection. Designers need to understand what is the bare minimum companies and products need to serve people better. They also need to make the process of personalization easy to understand from a value exchange perspective. For example, less client-facing legal jargon in account setups or registration process, and more everyday layman verbiage explaining the situation. Companies in the insurance and privacy space, such as Lemonade or SecurityPal, have shifted towards this design, which is a differentiator in the consumer’s mind.
