Making Autism Assessment affordable and accessible for all
Paving the way to address a seriously underserved allied healthcare need in community using co-design and design research.
Industry
Community Healthcare
Duration
4 weeks
Deliverables
Service model
High level business model
Implementation roadmap
Impact
Delivered a class-leading autism assessment service, designed to:
Provide a massively improved experience for families
Reduce cost for families to access the service by thousands of dollars
Provide a best-in-class experience for allied healthcare professionals, attracting top-talent for the organisation in the process
Provided detail on how the service could function operationally and financially
Laid the foundation for a small scale trial that led to a fully operational service in-market
WHAT was the problem
Unfortunately in Victoria, the waitlist for an autism assessment in the public system can be upwards of 12 months, and to seek a private assessment can cost thousands of dollars - prohibitively expensive for many families.
But what if there was a way to leverage an existing, well-equipped allied healthcare workforce, and create alternative funding models to undertake these assessments - slashing both the wait times for assessment and the out-of-pocket costs in the process?
That was how we were introduced to our project partners - a Melbourne community health organisation - with a well-formed idea about how to address an immediate and clear community need, but without a solid understanding of what it might look like in practice, or how it could work in operation.
APPROACH we took
Exploring the design from two perspectives
To create a class-leading service we knew we needed to address the design of the new service from two critical lenses:
Parents and guardians (families) of children with autism
The allied healthcare and professionals who would deliver the services
By exploring the project through these two lenses, we had the opportunity to create a service that would meet the needs of the parents, guardians and children, and in addition, would also act as a powerful tool to attract top-talent allied healthcare professionals to the services. This would help us address the extremely high demand for the service.
Virtual co-design with those with lived experience
To immerse ourselves in the context of the people we were trying to help, we arranged a series of virtual co-design workshops, where we invited a diverse cross-section of parents and guardians who had recently been through the autism assessment process. We also connected with a key peak body for autism in Victoria. We invited the workshop participants to share their stories, and gave them tools to communicate what their ideal experience might look like and unpacked the reasons why.
Virtual co-design with allied healthcare professionals
Using a similar approach, we connected with a diverse group of allied healthcare professionals - including paediatricians, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, developmental psychologists, and the operations managers of the clinical and allied health services - all of whom are typically involved with autism assessment. The autism assessment process is complex and a number of important situational contexts needed to be considered: the configuration of specialists to be involved in each step of the process, whether the assessment components are completed at the proposed assessment centre or in home, or early education contexts, for example. We explored these in detail, and again provided tools and methods for the professionals to express what a best-in-class experience might look like.
Making sure it meets the needs of users - Desirability
With a rounded understanding of the current met and unmet needs of the various stakeholders in our ecosystem, we moulded a first-pass, fully formed service model. The model described the end-to-end journey a parent or guardian might go on, in seeking an autism assessment for the first time. We played this back to our allied healthcare professionals and through several rounds of revision, converged on a model with a series of features that uniquely addressed the needs identified.
Making sure it would work - Feasibility and Viability
With a solid understanding of an “ideal future state service model”, we needed to make sure the new service could sustain itself into the future. We modelled the high-level costs and revenue streams associated with the new service, and, making clever use of a number of funding and revenue sources, confirmed that, in theory, we could slash the costs of the assessment process, without impacting the new service’s financial viability.
VALUE we created
A service model that meets the unmet needs of families
By drawing deeply on the knowledge of parents and guardians with lived experience, and working directly with the clinicians who would deliver the service on a daily basis, we were able to deliver a polished “service blueprint” - an artefact that brings-to-life the intended future-state experience. We used a narrative-driven storytelling approach to communicate the features and nuance that would sit behind this new service.
We played this back to our project stakeholders - which included representatives from the peak body for Autism in Victoria. The stakeholders not only praised the design but we heard some were moved to tears, hearing what the experience might be like for families navigating this journey in the future. For us, this highlighted not only the incredible pain and frustration that is currently felt but also the extent to which we were able to identify and address the unmet needs.
Significantly reduced cost of the service for families
A key barrier to families accessing autism assessment services in Victoria is the prohibitive cost associated with private assessments. By taking a business-led approach we were able to consider a vast range of income streams available to the organisation and re-imagine their allocation to create a co-funded business model for the new service. The result of this was a forecast cost to families thousands of dollars less than the next-closest alternative.
EMPOWERMENT we embedded
Actionable next steps
To ensure our partner had a clear pathway towards implementation we created a detailed implementation roadmap, with the first steps being to test the service model with potential end-users, before establishing a pilot - an initial small-scale launch to market, which would test the detailed mechanics of how the service would work. From there our partner would be able to rapidly scale the service with certainty and clarity.
Project Reflections
WAVE Reflections
“This was a really rapid engagement, as a community health organisation, there wasn’t a large budget to play with here, but there was a lot of positive can-do energy. So we had to think critically and creatively about how to make best use of that time and that energy. We partnered closely with the client and it didn’t take long to build a great rapport. With trust in-hand, the co-design workshops were really the key to unlocking the insights we needed to imagine something really different. We were also able to really productively leverage the wealth of knowledge the client had internally. These factors came together in a result I’m extremely proud of, and confident will make a huge difference to the Victorians who access it. I’m looking forward to hearing how they take it forward from here.”
- Mike | Service Design Lead, WAVE
This case study was compiled by Mike Jennings, Service Design Lead at WAVE Design. Mike is a human-centred designer driven by a desire to make the world a better place. With a background in Mechanical Engineering, he pairs an analytical and systems thinking mindset with creative curiosity to meaningfully engage with, and understand the world around him.
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