Personalized, AI-driven healthcare

Transforming the expertise of a standard-setting organization into a scalable digital product

$60M
IPO
Challenge

Treatment, an AI-diagnostic company, wanted to provide consumers with powerful health and wellness tools.

Outcome

Treatment Digital Health, a personalized symptom assessment and health management app.

Impact

A successful MVP launch that anchored a $60M IPO.

“Working with Highland is a really powerful experience for a company to be able to gain insights around a product. To have a group of people who know how to have real conversations with customers unlocks new pathways, ones that may be uncomfortable and uncover change, but they empower you to move forward in a way that feels really constructive.”

Chris Whitworth
Vice President

Moving from reactive to proactive AI-driven Healthcare

Treatment, an innovative healthcare technology company that develops advanced artificial intelligence (AI), knew they had the makings of a healthcare app unlike anything else on the market. They wanted to leverage a powerful diagnostic AI they had developed in a clinical setting to provide consumers with a health and wellness experience that puts healthcare into their own hands.

Treatment’s vision is to improve consumer’ holistic well being by delivering proactive health insights that empower them to make more informed health devisions.

Unlike common health assessment tolls like WebMD and Goggle, Treatment’s AI provided personalized answers to user’ health questions. It builds unique health profiles by considering each person’s medical history, characteristics, and API- connected data points from wearables, medical devices, and remote patient monitory apps.

But to succeed as a consumer app, Treatment needed guidance grounded it what was most valuable to their consumers. Highland set out to:

  • Identify customer segments and their individual needs
  • Extend current product offering to become a linking force between the wellness and healthcare industries
  • Extend Treatment’s value beyond a symptom checker top proactively to engage users who are not sick

Uncovering key needs in personalization and empowerment

Trust, empathy, and credibility needed to be emphasized in order to launch a digital product that sticks with consumers.We used the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework to understand what motivates prospective customers to use digital products and coupled it with exploratory research methods to gain even deeper behavioral insights. Results showed an array of functional, social, and emotional needs and wants across three target user personas and their use cases. While each different, their primary unmet needs were consistent: personalization and empowerment. Consumer research also uncovered a major challenge: people are generally skeptical of AI and often question its overall reliability — especially as it relates to their personal health and data security.

Designing for trust and an emotional connection

The development of the revamped mobile application designs focused heavily on user experience, user interface, usability, and user flow to ensure a quick emotional connection from the start. To combat distrust in the AI, we emphasized the truth behind it: these are real, intelligent people (the best doctors of University of Minnesota Medical School) that provide the most accurate medical knowledge. The app designs presented this detail in a simple, understandable format, with a warm, conversional brand identity and color scheme.

Additional features and functionality were incorporated to help Treatment offer a competitive, differentiated product that met gaps identified across the health and medical service ecosystem.

Rapid Prototyping accelerates speed to market and reduces development costs

Using design sprints, Highland rapidly prototyped and tested multiple iterations with a range of demographics and personas, fueling the transformation of app design while reducing future development costs. The design and development team learned fast and pivoted quickly to define everything from critical health outputs and push notifications (like blood pressure alerts or weekly progress tips) to prominent, transparent messaging that addressed AI, electronic health records (EHR), and electronic medical records (EMR) privacy concerns.

AI-driven Treatment app fuels successful IPO

The result was a new-to-the-world health and wellness app named Cara, driven by a clinically tested AI and delivering on the promise of personalized sick-care, health, and wellness in a single place.

After the launch of Cara, Treatment successfully completed an IPO on the Canadian Stock exchange in early 2021.

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