Democratizing personalized care for oncology patients.

We partnered with a Colorado-based Health Startup to build a product that would save lives by helping patients and oncologists discover emerging treatments for cancer easily and at the right time. We designed a product that enables oncologists to take better-informed treatment decisions, reducing the amount of time they spend on researching new treatments.

The challenge

Help community oncologists discover and determine the available precision treatment options and provide better opportunities for cancer patients.

The outcome

A product quite different from the idea we started with, and a startup team more aligned than ever.

We designed a product that included the original ideas but introduced simple solutions to other pains and problems oncologists have to tackle in their daily practices that consume a lot of time and require switching and browsing through different knowledge sources. Our deliberate focus on users help us discover these opportunities. Together with our customers we decided to pivot to a platform that cares for their research and case analysis process more integrally, and which they are more likely to use due to this.

Our process also includes a complete look at the product, which helped spark very important discussions among the startup team regarding the value proposition, positioning, and next steps to tackle TAM. This resulted in a very strong alignment which provided a strong focus to our work and unveiled new opportunities to explore later.

Dr Smith

Oncologist @ community cancer

"Devoted to delivering the best possible cancer care to his patients"

Meet Dr. Smith and The Problem

Community oncologists tend to attend 20 to 30 patients per day, caring for a really wide variety of different cancer types and patient journeys.

State-of-the-art precision oncology is a rapidly evolving and complex area with a massive amount of data being produced monthly with new clinical trials, drug pipelines, FDA-approved therapies, new molecular tests, and tons of papers published. For community oncologists, staying on top of the latest developments for each cancer type is practically impossible.

We wanted to create a product that would help community oncologists navigate this massive and voracious amount of precision medicine information available and discover new relevant developments in order to:

Provide better treatment options for patients

Help oncologists discover the best treatment path

Enable oncologist stay up to speed with the latest field developments

Dr Smith

Oncologist @ community cancer

"Devoted to delivering the best possible cancer care to his patients"

Meet Dr. Smith and The Problem

Provide better treatment options for patients

Help oncologists discover the best treatment path

Enable oncologist stay up to speed with the latest field developments

Mapping the problem and working directly with the users.

We conducted open interviews with pharmaceutical representatives, community oncologists, specialized research oncologists, and even more research-oriented oncologists to understand their usual practices around patient care and case analysis. We mapped out the problem while keeping the focus on Dr. Smith -our user persona-, and in doing so we discovered many new pain point areas.

This helped us identify other opportunity areas we could assist oncologists with our product, and we decided to further explore in a design sprint as our main concern was around: “Is the value proposition strong enough to drive oncologists into a new platform?” We quickly went on to ideate several solutions, iterating and remixing them to end up with a prototype to test.

When we tested the ideas we developed through a design sprint, the ones that stuck the most were ideas that tackled a different area of the problem than the original focus as it ended up being a pain as important or even more important than the original.

Mapping the problem and working directly with the users.

“Everyone is very impressed with the product”

Dave Parkhill

Co-Founder @ ONCO

“Everyone is very impressed with the product”

Dave Parkhill

Co-Founder @ ONCO

“Everyone is very impressed with the product”

Dave Parkhill

Co-Founder @ ONCO

Diving into peoples’ situated practices to add value

We decided to dive deeper into oncologists' research practices when dealing with particularly complex cases. We reviewed some particular cases together with them and they walked us through their thought and research process, step by step.
We wanted to make sure we were correctly understanding their situated medical practices, when and where happens it all happens, and how they do it and think about it.

Then, we went back and iterated over solutions and designs with both our design and technical teams. We came up with simple solutions and prototyped how the experience would look in the product, to test it out and gather feedback from oncologists and other people in the precision medicine space such as pathologists