Walgreens - Smart Medication Adherence Device
Background
Walgreens partnered with Google’s healthcare company, Verily, to help increase Walgreens’ patients’ medication adherence.
Increasing medication adherence was a big effort for Walgreens because for certain Medicare Part D insurance plans, Walgreens is incentivized from Insurance providers if their patients refill their prescriptions regularly.
Verily has been developing a smart device that could improve this populations’ adherence.
Study Goals
Understand the value of the smart device and what features are most critical to the program’s success for initial study and beyond.
Identify customer expectations across the end-to-end experience.
Understand any potential barriers to usage and any customer behaviors or perceptions that would impact the service.
Work Partners
Walgreens
Service designer
VP pharmacy systems
Director of pharmacy operations
Product manager of digital pharmacy
Verily (corporate partner)
Head of software engineering
2 software engineers
Industrial designer
UX designer
Research Method
10 in-home interviews
My Role
Selected method
Selected recruiting criteria and drafted screener
Worked with recruiting service to schedule participants
Worked with team to identify research questions
Drafted discussion guide
Moderated sessions
Conducted analysis and wrote findings report alongside service designer
Participants
Criteria:
1-5 meds
Comfortable using a smartphone
Currently managing their health digitally (doctor portal, Fitbit tracking, medication tracking)
Currently keeps at least 1 of their meds in the prescription bottle (doesn’t only transfer pills into another container)
Currently managing either diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol
Owns or shares responsibility to order and pick up prescriptions
Stated non-adherence (miss dose or take reduced dose 2+ times a week) = <80% adherence
Recruited 2 patient segments because the business thought 65+ should be targeted, but the design team wasn’t confident that this was the target market, so we opened it up to a younger generation based on Verily’s previous research that showed interest
5, 65+, on Medicare
5, 40-64, on Commercial Insurance
Key Research Questions
How are patients currently remembering to take their medication? Are they using any tools?
Do patients think they have trouble taking their medication more regularly?
How do patients react to this new device?
What are patients‘ initial reactions to this device?
What are barriers to adoption?
Key Findings
Younger population found service revolutionary due to the reminders and visibility into existing patterns.
Older population found service irrelevant and, at times, offensive.
The younger population thought the medical professional check-in was caring while the older population saw it as invasive.
Impact
Convinced the team that the population they were targeting weren’t interested in this device.
I suggested that a younger population was more interested and accepting of this technology, but this project and collaboration has been put on pause and hasn’t been worked on since.
Hindsight is 20/20
If the team was willing to pay a bit more, it would have been great to know who was interested in this service so we could have tailored our offering to that demographic from the start.