imaware™

Empowering patients to engage in personalized proactive healthcare

Empowering patients to engage in personalized healthcare

Modern healthcare is still more reactive than proactive. Too often, customers take action too late, only after symptoms present themselves, when the prognosis is already poor. imaware™ wanted to create a better world, one where an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure and consumers have the awareness and access to take action.

imaware and Blackcreek are partners in shaping the future of proactive healthcare. Together, we’ve built a state-of-the-art end-to-end customer experience, embracing patient-led storytelling, furthering scientific advancement, and creating the next generation of value-based care.

what we did

Strategy, eCommerce, User Experience Design, Creative & Visual Design, Web Development

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The story

Advancing Healthcare From Reactive to Proactive

The waters of the blood testing industry have been muddied by the recent memories of the Theranos scandal. Stigma and skepticism are now rightly associated with technology companies that make bold healthcare claims without scientific rigor, so we understood the need to approach this engagement delicately.

The approach

Understanding Complexities and Challenges

To support a collaborative environment and ensure our team became subject-matter experts, we opened our doors to the imaware team and invited them to participate in our discovery, design thinking, and technical inception workshops. The technology, science, and regulations all had to be considered.

We integrated our technology, product, and design teams throughout the project lifecycle to decompose the technical complexity, minimize costs, accelerate the timeline, and maximize overall efficiency. We used our innovation framework of rapid prototyping to align stakeholders and drive successful outcomes all the way from ideation to the delivery of an exceptional user experience.

The Discovery

Exploring Opportunities to Improve and Dive Deeper

The Discovery Phase is important for our team to get a better understanding of the business and customer experience for each of our clients. During our sessions with the imaware team, we aligned on the business objectives and technology requirements of the product, while clarifying their short-term goals and long-term vision. We dived deep to better understand the problem they were trying to solve, who they were solving it for, and their envisioned solution.

During this phase, our goal was to understand the ins and outs of the product; who is the target demographic, what is their current end-to-end experience with traditional lab testing, and how would imaware change that?

Design Thinking

Listening to End-Users

We began our Design Thinking Phase by performing focus groups and user interviews. We focused on gathering information from both consumers and doctors, supplemented with our preexisting dataset. Our design team sifted through and analyzed the information to find the most common pain points of each consumer.

Designing for healthcare? We created a handy guide that will help aspiring designers, and anyone interested in the industry, design with healthcare practices in mind.

Creative & UI

Creating a strong and Impactful Brand

The visuals of the platform were inspired by the same concepts as the information architecture and user experience. We focused on imagery that empowered the user, pairing it with visual assets and a color palette that made the information feel inviting and accessible. This puts the user in a more comfortable state of mind throughout the entire experience from purchase to results.

The Technology

Focusing on Compliance and Proper Integrations

One of the key architectural objectives was to vertically integrate as many of the components as possible to create a seamless user experience. However, we also understood there may be opportunities in the future to integrate additional tests, labs, LIMS, eCommerce platforms or microarray hardware. To this end, we designed the platform to follow a flexible private API model, that decoupled our vertically integrated backend systems and future-proofed our platform.

In the world of health-based products, there are no shortage of compliance requirements and regulations. There were a number of times where Microdrop had to add integrations from various services for compliance. Due to the flexibility of our system and the rich open source community of NodeJs, we were able to successfully integrate any API, whether it was over REST, SOAP, or HL7. For smaller integrations on the marketing side, we leveraged AWS lambda for their quick response times and geographic availability.

Our codebase is rapidly changing, and we need to be able to move from a PR to production quickly and securely. Leveraging Bitbucket pipelines, we can quickly, easily, and securely move our code to both development pipelines on AWS for testing and production pipelines for deployment, while using respective branches for each environment.

Design placed on an ipad
the outcome

Launching a proactive healthcare platform

We successfully built and launched a revolutionary platform that helps bring awareness to patients through proactive healthcare.
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We built an end-to-end customer experience through a vertically integrated eCommerce platform, a cloud based LIMS, and a state-of-the-art patient portal. We future-proofed the platform by making smart architectural decisions that enables the integration of new tests into the imaware ecosystem through a flexible private API model. We laid the foundations for a trustworthy brand that embraces patient-led storytelling, while maintaining a high level of standard for scientific rigor that both patients and healthcare professionals expect.

We are continuing to innovate with imaware as we launch more tests, develop new IP, and further refine the patient experience.

the takeaways

What we learned along the way

Looking back on the project, there's a few important takeaways to note:

‍1. Listen to your end-user, whether they are telling you through clicks, scrolls, or actually just messaging you, their feedback in all forms is invaluable.

‍2. You’re never going to create the perfect site that pleases everyone, launch but don’t forget to learn.

‍3. Communicate always. Whether it’s with yourselves, the client, or the end user, you’ll always learn something new by talking to someone and get a fresh perspective.

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