Preventing or delaying the need for insulin therapy in type 2 patients
Problem
Often patients with type 2 diabetes struggle to make the changes to their lifestyle necessary to keep their blood glucose levels in range. Over time this leads to additional complications, comorbitities, ER visits and insulin therapy.
Not only is this costly to the healthcare system and patients, it also negatively impacts their quality of life.
With cost savings of around $2000 per year per patient, US payers are keen to find solutions that motivate their non-insulin type 2 patients to make better lifestyle choices and gain control of their disease.
Services provided
Business Strategy
Competitor analysis
Design recommendations
Front-end Innovation
User Testing
Design Strategy
Feature recommendations
Rapid Prototyping
Solution
Qualitative studies and two key findings
We conducted multiple qualitative studies across the US to better understand the behaviours and lifestyles of patients living with type 2 diabetes. We targeted patients who are successfully managing their disease, as well as patients who are struggling.
This allowed us to build patient personas and archetypes mapping their journeys and experiences and highlighting the motivations, strategies and behaviours that have been the most successful.
We found two key insights:
- Diabetes coaches and educators have an important role in helping people understand their disease and how to manage it at an individual level
- The fear of progressing unto insulin therapy is a strong motivator for patients to take better control of their lifestyles and behaviours
These insights pushed us towards diabetes coaches and educators where we conduced additional qualitative studies to understand how they work, the challenges they have and the relationships they have with their patients.
We learned the biggest challenge they have is to convince their patients of how their lifestyle choices and behaviours are going have a negative impact on their disease progression.
This led us to our solution hypothesis.
Patients with a “scientific” 3rd party prognosis of their disease progression based on their lifestyle choices and behaviours would be more convinced of the need to make the necessary changes.
After running multiple experiments with patients and coaches using rough prototypes we gained sufficient evidence to validate this hypotheses and start building out the initial solution concept and business models.
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