“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
1966, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Healthcare today lacks transparency and the direct consumer feedback between price and value received. It is predictably driven by cost and ultimately paid for by individuals, employers, and government. Our complex system in the US is in the midst of tectonic changes. Yet the pace to deploy radical new innovations is painfully slow - not because they bring unacceptable risk to patients, but because the business risk of funding new approaches is not well tolerated.
Advances in medicine are being developed at ever increasing rates by pioneers across the health ecosystem. Despite a shared mission to reform healthcare, the process of innovation remains out of reach for many organizations serving vulnerable populations. Whether it’s the conditions for collaboration, the perceived constraints, or the ownership of ideas, collaboration across stakeholders can often lose sight of the bigger opportunity for change.
It is not a lack of ideas that keeps healthcare from radically innovating. The challenge with developing new offerings rests on turning future-facing ideas into capable solutions that work within modern operating models. Most healthcare organizations are built to deliver services, not create new ones. The absence of designers and entrepreneurs quickly narrows the funnel of emergent opportunities while reinforcing existing paradigms of care delivery.
We believe innovation focused on people is the catalyst for the durable impact needed to shape more resilient communities.
2021, Foundation for Design Run Concept
Working to serve the edges of our communities, particularly those most vulnerable, presents the opportunity to attract social impact investments and align philanthropic missions and their sources of capital to the early stage development of health solutions for people in need. When we solve for the needs of vulnerable communities first, a path to scale our innovations opens up for everyone else.
Building catalytic ecosystems to address worthy challenges requires us to form strategic relationships between health pioneers, providers, payors and community champions at many levels. These engagements are bound by clear models that show how each party shares in the value being created. Unique to each opportunity is a commitment to never pivot away from the needs of the people we seek to serve.
We bring together multi-disciplinary teams capable of imagining and building radical new offers with an entrepreneurial mindset. We orient teams around a human-centered design process that predictably works through discovery, ideation, and testing of new offers. Moreover, we build innovations alongside health partners to de-risk them amid the challenges of everyday workflows.