Using intensive customer discovery tools and product management practices to identify and develop tangible growth opportunities in the Indian healthcare sector
Challenge: Healthcare looks like a growth sector in the emerging markets. How do we develop tangible opportunities?
Impact: Growth opportunities and concepts developed in both urban and rural primary healthcare markets. With urban concepts now commercialized (link)
Situation: The healthcare space was a growth sector in emerging markets however, figuring out growth opportunities in the emerging regions had several challenges especially in terms of access and market need understanding.
- Both the urban and rural primary healthcare setups were completely different from any mature markets where we had our existing businesses
- In a geography like India there are regional, economic and lingual differences across the country and individual states that added to the complexity
- Even if we could develop offerings, to operate a business we didn’t have the necessary scale in-terms of market access.
Approach: A ground’s up effort in terms of immersion into the market by large scale user research both in urban and rural India. Later development of concepts and business models and partnerships to launch
- The first step was immersion into the urban and rural primary healthcare setups. This involved in-depth user research especially observational research to inform what the critical needs were
- We identified value propositions for both the urban physicians office (ability to see more patients, develop the beginnings of a electronic medical records system) as well as rural healthcare workers (on the spot basic health diagnostics)
- The next step was prototyping concepts. UX was key here to make things extremely simple to use else to drive adoption.
- The other key aspect was managing costs, hence sourcing hardware and medical peripherals was a key activity
- Pilots were run across several physicians office to gauge the effectiveness of the solution as well as test pricing concepts
- Ultimately a joint venture was sought to be forged with our partner in India who would lead the effort in terms of channel development and market communication whilst we would be the technology partner
Impact: By means of use of a mix of qualitative and quantitative studies and agile development we arrived at several opportunities
- Growth opportunities in digitizing the urban physician’s office (this is now launched by our then partner in India – link)
- Arming the front line rural healthcare workers with simple sensors and technology to conduct on the spot health vital checks
- Opportunities for providing in-home elder care monitoring in senior retirement communities
