Guiding digital shifts in healtcare

biotech + healthcare

2023

Accelerating global paediatric cancer research through an ethically governed, user-friendly platform that securely exposes genomic, clinical and multi-omics data. drastically simplified data access and strengthened collaboration across institutions.

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As a publicly funded initiative, ZERO - Australia’s national precision medicine program for children with cancer, led in partnership by Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre, maintains a commitment to share its data and resources with the wider research community in a carefully managed, ethically responsible manner.

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Objectives

As the newly onboarded design lead, on high-impact state-wide government health program, I inherited:

→ A ticking clock: High-pressure deadlines to launch an MVP
→ Fragmented insights: Lack of single source of truth
→ Quick sand: Shifting priorities, misalignment on expectation, needs, technical feasibility (e.g., backend interoperability) and safety requirements

The key objective of the programs was digitising an existing paper solution in attempt to:
→ Increase early health checks, vaccinations and well-being of children aged 0 to 4yo

→ Validate whether the proposed digital solution addressed core user needs and technical feasibility to drive adoption.

→ Identify risks in solution architecture (e.g., interoperability gaps, usability barriers) that could undermine long-term value.

→ Ensure alignment between user needs (parents/carers, clinicians) and program constraints (technical, policy, resource).

Approach and process

As the deadlines were pre-set, before me joining the team, the first step was to unpack the existing knowledge and assess current design maturity of the program.

Due to initial resistance to conducting customer engagement, my approach was to kick-off with co-design workshops and quick prototypes, as a segue towards validating the designs with small group of users.

That gave me the opportunity to engage group of 5 people, inviting the team to listen in during the moderated interview sessions, and later playing back all insights, including highlighting of risks to the wider team.
The early insights, gained a lot of traction and created opportunity to help grow the team's maturity from there.
What followed next:
Continued to iterate on the prototypes based on the collected feedback, while also used the new gained laverage to initiate series of research planing workshops to align team goals and elevate design maturity across departments.

→ Developed a robust experience research plan to guide a state-wide program, ensuring engagement with minority and underrepresented communities across the state.

→ Facilitated research-planning sessions with stakeholders to clarify Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) and establish key program objectives, ensuring cohesive direction and shared vision.

→ Mapped dependencies between user needs and backend capabilities.

Realising the need of evidence-based risk mitigation:

Once the stakeholder team realised there are few hanging fruits and risky unvalidated assumptions, a decision was made to pause and return to conducting a robust validation. I led the research strategy to inform the direction of the program ensuring consistent engagement of underrepresented communities.
Coordinated a team of three researchers, to synthesise and triangulate data from 3 rounds of comprehensive mixed-methods research (1,400+ participants total):

→ Field studies in remote/urban regions (800+ parents/carers).

→ In-depth moderated sessions with 20+ people including marginalised communities to surface adoption barriers.

→ Quantitative surveys (666 responses) on trust, data ownership, and perceived value.

We triangulated the findings exposing critical gaps:
💡 Interoperability limitations jeopardising user workflows.
💡 Mismatch between proposed MVP and users’ expectations of value.

Impact

The collected insights intelligence allowed the program to make informed data-driven decision on pausing development to re-scope solution architecture, avoiding costly rework.

Forecasted impact:

→ $12M in forecasted savings by halting development of a misaligned solution, enabling reallocation toward foundational technical upgrades.

→ Allowed for resource allocation and enhanced efficiency by focusing on the most impactful requirements

→ Elevated design’s strategic role: framed research as a tool for risk intelligence, shifting leadership’s focus from “speed to launch” to “sustainable value creation.”