Kaiser Permanente: Imagining Care Anywhere® for Medicare

Kaiser Permanente: Imagining Care Anywhere^® for Medicare

PROJECT

CLIENT

Kaiser Permanente

SERVICES

Experience Design
Physical Experience

INDUSTRY

Life Sciences & Healthcare

Kaiser Permanente took bold steps to envision the future for both Medicare patients and the larger care network of family members and providers.

Challenge

There's little doubt that healthcare is moving outside the doctor’s office and the hospital and into community, home, and virtual settings. Kaiser Permanente developed a provocation called Imagining Care Anywhere® (ICA), that began as a dialogue about how current and future technologies could transform care. Considering its older members who were beginning to age into retirement, KP wanted to focus both on Medicare patients and the larger care network of family
members and providers.

Building on KP’s provocation of Imagining Care Anywhere®, Continuum co-developed an interactive experience featuring stories, concepts, videos, sets, and prototypes, ultimately creating a care scenario served entirely outside of traditional medical facilities.

Together, teams from Continuum and KP worked to bring this future to life using human-centered design methods including qualitative research, persona development, iterative prototyping, immersive storytelling, and live demonstrations.

"When patients aren't able to actively engage in their care, then we can't effectively do our job."

Jed Weissberg
MD

Research & Insights

Immersed in Research

We integrated and drew on research from across KP, its various Innovation Centers, and ongoing projects. We met innovators who built collaborative models of elder care outside of any medical system, conducted numerous stakeholder interviews, and shadowed healthcare workers. Our goal? To understand better the complex landscape of KP’s current state, alternative competitive models, and KP’s future vision for its Medicare members and employees.

Understanding Channels

To innovate the care model of Medicare patients and their support teams, we had to think beyond traditional brick-and-mortar medical centers. We investigated the current needs of KP patients, and how to distribute those needs across multiple channels and various providers. We envisioned a patient’s robust care team, aimed to optimize established channels and current and emerging technology, and integrated the whole into the demands and expectations of a new generation of patients.

Integrating Care

We asked ourselves: What are the benefits of remote care? How can remote care support self-care and community engagement for an aging patient population? How might new services integrate emerging social behaviors identified in user research with existing models of care? We envisioned new provider roles and created ideas and stories employing the established community resources that kept patients socially, mentally, and physically engaged, all without relying on KP’s current medical centers.

Prototyping the Future of Human-Centered Technology

In the course of our research, we saw that we’d need to design and fabricate the physical elements and the user interfaces of the experience. Together, our Continuum and KP team used its deep expertise in physical, digital, and theatrical prototyping to bring our future vision to life in an immersive way that allowed visitors to engage with empathy and compassion, both for patients and for providers.

Solution

The end result is a tour through the future of Medicare from both the provider and member perspectives, reimagining the near-term and far-term future of both employee and patient roles. The interactive narrative is a clear, lively combination of story, illustration, and video; which speaks eloquently about Medicare’s future challenges, in the next 10-15 years. We focused on new and emerging technologies, with a sensitivity to the seniors who would be using them, all of which brought these provocations to life.

Imagining Care Anywhere ®—Medicare has been a powerful initiative for Kaiser Permanente. It has sparked conversation across the organization and with KP’s labor partners about a shared future. It was a catalyzing force for the implementation of virtual care, but most importantly modelled the value of experience design.

“The ICA work is powerful for KP because it enables us to "look out" into the future—envisioning a world where we meet our customers rapidly changing needs with enabling technologies and new models of care.”

Jennifer Liebermann
Senior Director, Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, Kaiser Permanente

“Leo and Rosemary's story engages people emotionally, mentally and physically to create the future of health for our members and their families.”

Mike Holland
Director, Innovation Lab, Kaiser Permanente

Results

This program has proved to be quite successful for KP. To date, over 40,000 people have been exposed to the ICA work in person or through travelling roadshow versions. The project also helped catalyze a number of internal projects and contributed to the spread of human-centered design in parts of the organization that may have been analytics-driven in the past. ICA-Medicare also helped reframe long-established mental models of the KP community and inspired workforce planning teams to develop an entire conference around how future employee roles are impacted by new models of care.

With projects like Imagining Care Anywhere®, KP is actively preparing their people to thrive in their future Medicare ecosystem. KP’s entire ICA project, including our Medicare story, is now featured here.

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