How a US pharmacy start-up is hoping to redesign healthcare
Applying design principles to the US healthcare experience could help cut out “frustrating and complicated” consumer pathways according to pharmacy start up PillPack, which is aiming to shakeup the sector to make it “less of an obnoxious experience”.
Founded in 2012 PillPack aims to simplify the pharmacy experience by filling, sorting, and delivering all of a patient's medications in personalised packets based on when they need to take them. The online pharmacy has already raised $12.8m in funding and founder and CEO TJ Parker is keen to lead the health care sector in embedding design throughout the business system.
“We think about design in a much broader way than just the aesthetics or the way something looks; it’s really about each touch point that you have with your customer and how thoughtful you are about how it feels to be that customer,” he told Pearlfisher’s London chief creative officer Jonathan Ford as part of the design agency’s Challengers and Icons series.
“We have worked very hard to make things like switching to PillPack, and the on board experience really simple, and obviously the PillPack speaks for itself, it does just show up every two weeks. But even something that just shows up every two weeks was really thoughtful, most prescriptions are filled in 30 day increments and as human you don’t think about the world in 30 day increments…”
That thinking has now been expanded to an app to remind patients to take their medication, but has been designed to fit into people’s lives rather than the usual alarm-based reminder. Instead, the app creates context-aware reminders, using sensors and GPS, to send out push notifications; for example to remind users to put their medication in their bag and then take it when they get to work. The app is available to anyone, not just PillPack users, and forms part of Parker’s quest to redefine the pharma industry.
“The vast majority of health experiences are not well designed, they are frustrating, they’re complicated and they were designed to meet the needs of typically entities other than the customer or the patient that is receiving care,” he explained. “Our ambition is to make not just pharmacy better but healthcare at large better. We would be remiss if that was only PillPack – if we didn’t have an impact on the rest of the industry and folks hopefully will follow us and think about the same things.”
Parker continued that the industry is lagging behind “10 or 15 years” but now has the opportunity to create a good customer experience. “It’s absolutely our goal to shakeup not just pharmacy but healthcare, and make it less of an obnoxious experience,” he said.