Decoding digital health

The design thinking approach in digital health is a user-centric, iterative process involving understanding user needs, generating innovative ideas, and rapid prototyping and testing. It ensures active involvement of potential users, including HCPs, patients, and caregivers, from problem discovery to testing, iteration, and implementation. This approach demands a cross-functional team: strategists shape the solution's value proposition, medical and legal advisors ensure compliance, and user experience designers pinpoint pain points and design, test, and refine the solution. Dermanostic, a skincare telemedicine startup, serves as a prime example, engaging and iterating with customers early on, resulting in a solution finely attuned to their needs and preferences.

Our experience: For a rare disease DHS, involving specialist healthcare professionals and caregivers from the start enabled us to design user journeys, identify pain points, and develop effective solutions through iterative testing.

Validating DHS within the broader ecosystem is pivotal. An ecosystem panel, involving diverse stakeholders, ensures market suitability from multiple perspectives. Collaboration with tech companies, patient organizations, and payers not only expands networks but also fosters informal collaborations that may blossom into formal partnerships. In addition, this approach acknowledges the challenges of neutrality and Pharma ownership. The inclusion of patients and diverse other stakeholders in the panel fosters an end-to-end (E2E) perspective and cross-sector collaboration, leading to higher neutrality of the solution.

As exemplified by Doctolib, a pioneer in digital appointment booking, this approach broadens networks, bolsters credibility within the ecosystem, and confirms the solution's alignment with the broader healthcare landscape.

Our experience: After the initial ideas were captured during the project, tech companies, payers and others worked together to identify an even broader range of ideas and shaped them into meaningful concepts. They also supported judgements on feasibility, e.g., from a technology and regulatory perspective.

In the pharmaceuticals and life science industry, the digital health solutions that thrive are those trusted by key opinion leaders, HCPs, caregivers, and patients. Brand trust is arguably one of the most valuable intangible assets. Brand trust creates loyalty, builds advocacy, and drives additional users. Often, PharmaCo-branded solutions achieve the opposite, to the detriment of their success. Branding that supports a digital health solution should instead underscore its PharmaCo neutrality and emphasize tools, content and processes vetted and co-created by key opinion leaders and solution users.

Our experience: HCPs, caregivers and patients clearly voiced the view that PharmaCo branding would undermine the credibility of the solution, since it would evoke the impression that it was developed to better position the PharmaCo and its products. Accordingly, we chose a neutral branding that highlights the partners, such as key opinion leaders and caregiver associations, to evoke trust from the solution’s users.

Generally, clarity on the value levers of a DHS and any expected revenues and costs - including the underlying assumptions - should increase over the course of DHS development. A clear value case is also important to ensure continuous support from the PharmaCo’s management and development partners. For a PharmaCo, a DHS can have significant scalability potential to other therapeutic areas, which should be reflected in the business model discussions. As the development progresses, it is essential to determine the expected remaining development and run costs, as well as the expected realistic revenues, e.g., through reimbursement or increased drug adherence. As demonstrated by Avi Medical, a pioneer in hybrid next-gen GP practices that is slowly growing its practice network and offering, an incremental approach ensures long-term success.

Our experience: By developing clear value propositions for each user group and partner, we created hypotheses that were validated over time, ensuring the business model's alignment with the evolving Digital Health landscapes.

Data from DHS can be useful along a PharmaCo’s value chain in many ways, — powering clinical trials, real-world evidence, market research, and pharmacovigilance. An early, data-savvy strategy can shape and secure a digital health solution's value proposition. Prioritizing user-friendly, compliant, and safe data collection is a key driver for acceptance and buy-in. As illustrated by Qualifyze, a pioneer in centralized pharma audits with a business model built around their data, this strategic approach ensures that the data generated is not only valuable but also aligns seamlessly with the overall goals of the digital health solution.

Our experience: After the high-level concept had been established, on the one hand, we created transparency on the data that could be useful for a PharmaCo and various ecosystem stakeholders. On the other hand, technical experts and HCPs helped to shape the DHS concept from a functional perspective, to ensure that the data most valuable for users will be collected in a reliable and trusted manner. Fusing both sides results in a DHS that provides highly valuable data for all stakeholders.