Opportunity: Ghana is considered a relatively prosperous country on the African continent, and yet like many places (including the US!), it still faces many challenges because of the chasm between standards of living for the rich and poor. One such difference exists between the standard of health care available to those who can afford it, and to those who cannot. Our client for this project, BIMA Mobile and their Ghana office, decided to expand beyond their usual domain of microinsurance for health to create a simple teledoctor service to address the gap in healthcare access, called BIMA Doctor.

Year: 2016

Role: Creative lead

Process: In 2016, our team from Dalberg Design spent 8 weeks conducting extensive research on the healthcare context for urban Ghanaians who cannot afford access to quality care, and turning those insights into opportunities and solutions for the BIMA Mobile team to utilize as part of their teledoctor strategy going forward. We spoke with everyone from community members and patients at clinics to doctors, nurses, pharmacists, druggists, and healthcare administrators. Besides me and my designer colleague, our design team was composed of BIMA staff, who learned the design process as they went along! Everyone did a great job and after conducting over 100 interviews, we felt fairly confident in our recommendations.

Outputs: Our extensive final recommendations included interactive mobile media options for customers, as well as expanding into providing similar services for pharmacies in Ghana. This project also represents my first pure service design project, since we did not delve into the technicalities of the teledoctor call center. However, we also provided the BIMA team with design principles and user experience research to support their ongoing effort to translate the BIMA Doctor service into an Android application.

Two years after this project, BIMA Doctor was recognized by the West Africa Clinical Alliance as being the best teledoctor service in West Africa!