Designing the strategic roadmap of a purpose-driven startup
Project Overview
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Dance for Healing is a purpose-driven startup that believes in the power of dance as therapy. They are providing Creative Arts Therapy to chronic patients, elders, and caregivers. My team assessed their current business strategy and used human-centered design-thinking to identify opportunities to scale their vision of a more equitable health future by building a 5-year strategic roadmap.​
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Client
Dance4Healing
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Duration
Aug – Nov 2022
Methods
Desk research, subject matter expert interviews, stakeholder mapping, business model design, rapid prototyping
My Role
Design Strategist
Team
Meghna Prakash - Design Researcher
Tomomi Tanigawa - Business Designer
Delivering business model innovation with a design mindset.
This project focused on the intersection of design thinking and business strategy. Being adviced by two EY management consultants, we addressed how to quickly identify organizational constraints, and find leverage for implementing design strategy to accelerate innovation for our startup clients.
Challenge
Today approximately only 6% of the UChicago Medicine patient population has an HPOA
For patients between the ages of 18 and 40, this is as low as 0.7%
Outcome
Immediate Business Model
Through analysis and industry research, we designed a win-win partnership strategy that empowers Dance4Healing to immediately deliver Creative Arts Therapy at scale.
Saas, Future Business Model
By looking at the holistic system, we identified an opportunity to maximize patient reach by leveraging the efficiencies of Yumlish and creating a platform for Registered Dietitians.
5 Year Strategic Roadmap
We collaborated with the client to create a plan for achieving the goal purpose. Our plan considers customer, offering, process, tech/data, talent, and partnerships.
Tackling the problem of ...
We use a mixed methods approach to understand possible barriers for patients to have an HPOA on file.
Chronic diseases are an epidemic among older adults in the US that brings social isolation and loneliness to their lives.
Dance4Healing believes Creative Arts Therapy can help
Older adults with chronic illnesses are more likely to experience social isolation and loneliness.
This contributes to worsening their health, as it can prevent them from participating in exercise and other activities outside the home.
Approximately 25% of adults over the age of 50 experience loneliness and isolation.
Music, dance, and art have been clinically validated
to prevent chronic disease and improve mental,
physical, and neuro health.
• Increase social connections and happiness
• Reduce stress, anxiety and depression
• Build and retain people’s regular exercise habits
Six in ten Americans are living with at least one chronic disease,
Chronic diseases are especially prevalent in certain groups, such as older adults, low-income adults, and minorities. More than 85% of American adults age 65 and older have at least one chronic disease, and 65-75% of those adults have two or more chronic diseases.
Six in ten Americans are living with at least one chronic disease,
Chronic diseases are especially prevalent in certain groups, such as older adults, low-income adults, and minorities. More than 85% of American adults age 65 and older have at least one chronic disease, and 65-75% of those adults have two or more chronic diseases.
Process and stakeholders maps helped me better understand the current experience
Me leading a discussion to identify barriers and pain points in the patient journey, using an iteration of the journey map as a tool for conversation
Discoveries
Dance4Healing's current operation
Based on what we learned about D4H, we helped them verbalize their mission
Our purpose is to make healthy exercise habits accessible, fun, and supportive through cultural experiences full of music, dance, and art so that older adults, chronic disease patients, and caregivers can collectively enrich their lives mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Co-Designing D4H's purpose statement
Understanding the big picture
Value-exchange ecosystem map
We mapped out the relationships between Dance4Healing, current system actors, and possible future players. By mapping the various actors we were able to identify inter-dependencies and highlight opportunities.
Click on the image to see the details
Lean business model canvas
We utilized this framework to identify what D4H's biggest advantages were, who their ideal customer is, and how they may create revenue.
Click on the image to see the details
How might we financially sustain Yumlish's purpose-driven efforts, while keeping the service low, to no-cost for the patients?
Ask 1
Creating an actionable strategy
Collaboratively identifying assumptions
We identified hypotheses that had to be true for Dance4Healing to succeed.
In a collaborative virtual session with the founder, we sorted each hypothesis based on importance, and if evidence existed to prove them.
Click on the image to see the details
Design experiments to test assumptions
To prove or disprove the ranked hypotheses, we designed small-scale experiments to test the viability, desirability, and feasibility of D4H's strategy.
The results of 6 experiments were synthesized and recommendations for improvements were given to Dance4Healing.
Click on the image to see the details
Learning about partnerships with elder care services
We did special research to learn about the partnership arrangements between health startups and elder care providers. We were able to report to Dance4Healing what an arrangement might look like, and what steps they could take to pursue a partnership.
A proposed interim business model
Yumlish is currently pursuing subscription-based agreements with employers, but those efforts have proportional outcomes.
With our experiments and research into elder care service partnerships, we constructed a win-win value proposition that enables Dance4Healing to provide CAT and collect data on improved health outcomes simultaneously.
How might we scale creative arts therapy to be accessible to as many people as possible?
Ask 2
Expanding the impact
Value-exchange ecosystem map
The forgotten stakeholder
Thanks to your immersion and stakeholder mapping, we were able to identify the ability to scale care not be reaching more patients, but by reaching more registered dietitians.
Click on the image to see the details
Lean business model canvas
We utilized this framework to identify what D4H's biggest advantages were, who their ideal customer is, and how they may create revenue.
Click on the image to see the details
What I’d do differently next time…
🧬 Understanding relationships and influences is key when working in healthcare.Work in healthcare is quite complex as it involves many hierarchies and relationships between different stakeholders internal and external to the healthcare organization. To start with a clearer understanding of all the areas and stakeholders relevant to the project, next time I am going to lead a collaborative stakeholder mapping session with the project sponsors, to see who has the most influence on the HPOA process and to be able to reach them earlier in the process.
🤸 Adopt a flexible process when designing for complexity. At first, my team struggled a lot to identify touch points with the organization, as we discovered that the user journey was multi-path, incorporating both physical and digital versions of processes. Therefore, I conducted patient interviews and contextual inquiry in the clinic during the initial stage and focused on discovering the gaps of the users to complete the process. By having both an internal and external perspective, it was much easier to put together a map of the current experience.