In 2022, after having become the preferred employee health insurance provider for many companies, Loop wanted to expand into primary healthcare. They partnered with Prophecy to help them envision and launch a consumer offering.
The project was done in close collaboration with Loop team comprising of Shami Raj and Mayank Kale (Co-founders of Loop), Dr. Sukrit (Medical Director) and Dr. Priyadarshani Jagtap (Manager) along with the team at Prophecy comprising of Siddharth Ahuja (Senior Product Designer), Mahima Chandak (Senior User Researcher) and Akshay Verma (Design Lead). Special thanks to Jaie Karve for illustrations for the case study.
Though the initial project discovery was done in around 4.5 months, Prophecy was involved with the app refinement, crafting user journeys for prospective user segments and creating an experience vision to communicate the nuances of the design interventions to the broader design team at Loop for the next 1.5 years.
This case study highlights insights gained through 12 focused iterations of research, prototyping, and testing during the course of the project. Each round sharpened our understanding of the problem1, surfaced nuanced insights2 for targeted solutions, and refined the guiding principles3 that informed design interventions4.
When a loved one falls ill, whether it's a high fever or a troubling chest pain, we find ourselves reluctantly entrusting their well-being to the healthcare services at our disposal. We sign up for expert care, but are made to feel neglected, aggravated, and overwhelmingly lost. It often seems like we’re stuck in a labyrinth of broken systems, and regrettably, we have few genuine alternatives that can truly support us during these challenging times.
Despite the chaos and frustration, we tolerate these services due to a primal need: survival. Our tolerance grants companies a free pass to get away with meeting our bare minimum needs — and that too poorly. Even with an abundance of services, both old and new, we haven’t seen any notable transformation in healthcare.
Big players such as Aster, Fortis, and Apollo position themselves as a premium service by selling us their celebrity doctors, specialised medical services, and extravagant facilities. They lure us in with the promise of the best care that money can buy.
However, reality is far removed from this marketing image. Our actual interactions are riddled with a lack of transparency, complex administrative mazes, long waiting hours, and an indifferent attitude — leaving us feeling drained and defeated. Despite their medical expertise, our interactions are often sterile and inhumane. We leave the premises feeling exasperated, never wanting to go through the ordeal again.
Frustrated with big hospitals, we turn to new players who have optimised their services for speed and price. Players like Practo and Medibuddy provide us with convenient and immediate solutions that are easy on the pocket. However, these rational business decisions that help new players secure a foothold ultimately end up eclipsing real care.
Here we’re subjected to superficial guidance, inaccurate diagnosis, and consultations with inexperienced doctors that barely last a few minutes. There is a lack of incentive to genuinely keep us healthy — providing just enough surface level value to scale quickly. Here too we find it hard to place our trust and loyalty to any given service. As soon as there is a cheaper, faster alternative, we are quick to switch.
On the other hand, family doctors are professionals we have held on to since childhood and have unwavering loyalty towards. These doctors have a unique talent for placing care at the very heart of the healthcare experience, breathing life into what could otherwise be a sterile clinical transaction. They not only address our symptoms but also our human need to feel safe in the face of danger.
However, discovering these doctors, who are sparse and scattered, happens through a series of trials and errors that we subject ourselves through. Moreover, family doctors do not build ecosystems for all our healthcare needs, resulting in fragmented journeys. We are left to figure out separate solutions for diagnostics, medication, and specialised care.
With each iteration we gained knowledge which further consolidated our learnings to build better prototypes, truly solve for the unmet needs of the people and design the right interventions.
This section highlights some of the key learnings we uncovered from experiments and interviews that we conducted.
In order to truly deliver excellent care, we needed to create a cohesive patient experience across patient’s journey, involving checkups, consults, pharmacy and lifestyle management. We over the course of the project came up with a few guiding principles that helped us ensure we were always working towards the right direction.
Don’t just teach generic do’s and don’ts, but teach patients what works or doesn’t work for their particular body.
Tap into the patient’s innate curiosity to answer all their questions. Turn the clinic into a classroom. Replace the fear of the unknown with a deep sense of clarity.
This clarity will lead to motivation, motivation to action, and action to better health.
What it takes to achieve good health is a changing of deeply ingrained lifestyle habits. However, doctors give prescriptions, and follow up only after months.
Patients know what they must do, but they are overwhelmed by what it will take.
Break big goals into smaller, shorter-term ones. Proactively and regularly evaluate if the patient is following the care plan. Improve the plan until it is not just effective, but also achievable.
Help the patient follow the plan one day at a time and getting their health in order won’t be as overwhelming anymore.
Continually ask ourselves, for each patient, “are they healthy?” or “how can we make them healthier?” Rather than only looking at the immediate complaint of the patient, see their health as a continuous journey and be present at each step along the way to help change it for the better.
Through a combination of data science and the doctor’s intuition, illuminate their entire past, guide them in their present, and proactively look out for their future.
Eliminate barriers that lead to patients neglecting their health — be it disinterest in follow ups or logistical challenges. People should only have to come to Loop once. Then, Loop keeps going to them.
We wanted bring about a lasting, long-term, positive change to patients’ health which required designing a fundamentally different healthcare service that ensured continuous care of patient’s health even after their first interaction with Loop.
A baseline health checkup with the following ingredients that establishes the starting point from which health improvements will be tracked over time.
The doctor’s office turned into a classroom in which consultation is facilitated using interactive reports on a big screen.
The timeline captures the patient’s health history in a chronological order, which includes symptoms, medicines, and diagnoses. This knowledge enhances the doctor's ability to offer informed advice.
Reports spotlight only two types of indicators — ones that are currently abnormal/borderline or ones that were previously abnormal and are now under control. Doctors provide detailed explanations of these key biomarkers, helping patients gain a deep understanding of their health with particular focus on what needs improving.
A care plan that fits patient’s lifestyle, family and cultural context encompassing diet, exercise and medication, tied to a set of achievable health goals is co-created along with the doctor.
Most healthcare providers end post the doctor consultation, but for Loop, this is where care begins.
As soon as the patient exists the doctors clinic ✨ a moment of magic happens. Patient’s get a summary of the report and consult in the Loop app: Timeline, Health Report Summary, Full Checkup Report, and the Care Plan.
Over time, the app becomes a companion for the patient to take care of their health which offers regular health insights, access to dedicated care team at Loop, a consolidated view that combines data from across all their checkups, personalised health related articles/videos, and a view to track their parent’s health.
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Drove 30% of overall business revenue, serving 10k+ customers within six months of launch.
Built a scalable solution in the red-ocean of healthcare, with a potential to serve 3 million people in India.
