Background / Issue and Objectives

Proteus Digital Health is a company based in Redwood, California commercialising a new category of therapy: digital medicines. They have patented an ingestible sensor to accompany pharmacological medicine. When this sensor reaches a patient’s stomach, it sends a signal to a patch worn on the patient’s torso. This patch also records, steps, activity, rest and heart rate and communicates these metrics to a patient app and the patient’s care team.

The Proteus product had been initially designed to meet the needs of patients with chronic cardiovascular conditions like type 2 diabetes and hypertension. The product team were looking to rethink the current experience with a focus on Hep C patients.

Approach

We interviewed a generational mix of patients who were currently infected or recently cured of Hepatitis C about their experiences with the virus and the medication treatments.

We developed a collection of tools and tasks intended to make the patient think and recollect their experiences with Hep C, share memories of objects which helped them stay on track with their treatment, stories of high and low points in their journey towards ‘sustained viral load’ or being cured and people who helped them along the way. Our conversations revealed insights about differences in the generational experience of Hepatitis C.

To understand more about medication adherence patterns, we developed a custom dashboard which layered pill intake adherence data from 60 Hep C patients. We analysed this data to reveal three types of experience journeys.

Results

We gained rich insights that led to the development of three patient experience journeys based on behavioural segments. Due to a strict non-disclosure agreement, we are unable to share these, but look forward to them being turned into features and services which accompany the Proteus offering.