Kaiser Permanente: Imagining Care Anywhere® for Medicare
Kaiser Permanente took bold steps to envision the future for both Medicare patients and the larger care network of family members and providers.
Kaiser Permanente took bold steps to envision the future for both Medicare patients and the larger care network of family members and providers.
01
Challenge
There's little doubt that healthcare is moving outside the doctor’s office and the hospital and into community, home, and virtual settings. Kaiser Permanente developed a provocation called Imagining Care Anywhere® (ICA), that began as a dialogue about how current and future technologies could transform care. Considering its older members who were beginning to age into retirement, KP wanted to focus both on Medicare patients and the larger care network of family
members and providers.
Building on KP’s provocation of Imagining Care Anywhere®, Continuum co-developed an interactive experience featuring stories, concepts, videos, sets, and prototypes, ultimately creating a care scenario served entirely outside of traditional medical facilities.
Together, teams from Continuum and KP worked to bring this future to life using human-centered design methods including qualitative research, persona development, iterative prototyping, immersive storytelling, and live demonstrations.
"When patients aren't able to actively engage in their care, then we can't effectively do our job."—Jed Weissberg, MD
02
Research & Insights
03
Solution
The end result is a tour through the future of Medicare from both the provider and member perspectives, reimagining the near-term and far-term future of both employee and patient roles. The interactive narrative is a clear, lively combination of story, illustration, and video; which speaks eloquently about Medicare’s future challenges, in the next 10-15 years. We focused on new and emerging technologies, with a sensitivity to the seniors who would be using them, all of which brought these provocations to life.
Imagining Care Anywhere ®—Medicare has been a powerful initiative for Kaiser Permanente. It has sparked conversation across the organization and with KP’s labor partners about a shared future. It was a catalyzing force for the implementation of virtual care, but most importantly modelled the value of experience design.
“The ICA work is powerful for KP because it enables us to "look out" into the future—envisioning a world where we meet our customers rapidly changing needs with enabling technologies and new models of care.”
—Jennifer Liebermann, Senior Director, Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, Kaiser Permanente
“Leo and Rosemary's story engages people emotionally, mentally and physically to create the future of health for our members and their families.”
—Mike Holland, Director, Innovation Lab, Kaiser Permanente
04
Results
This program has proved to be quite successful for KP. To date, over 40,000 people have been exposed to the ICA work in person or through travelling roadshow versions. The project also helped catalyze a number of internal projects and contributed to the spread of human-centered design in parts of the organization that may have been analytics-driven in the past. ICA-Medicare also helped reframe long-established mental models of the KP community and inspired workforce planning teams to develop an entire conference around how future employee roles are impacted by new models of care.
With projects like Imagining Care Anywhere®, KP is actively preparing their people to thrive in their future Medicare ecosystem. KP’s entire ICA project, including our Medicare story, is now featured here.
