Challenge:

The work which I am going to discuss here is ‘Healthcare status in Rural India’.  I

wanted to know what the Influential factors that determine the healthcare status of any landscape

are; in this case I have taken a village called Kakudia, Odisha-India. It is a village with almost

every resident’s income level is below poverty line. The healthcare status of the region of course

was poor. So, It was quite easy to attribute the income level is the reason for their low healthcare

concerns. And it was quite reasonable to belief that also. But, while doing this Design Thinking

course, I started to think in a different way. I wanted to study deep into it and reason it out, i.e. I

wanted to confirm/disconfirm it that family income is/is not the key factor/only key factor in

deciding the healthcare status. That is the challenge I was onto. And I was seeking design

thinking tools to help me solve this.

Selection:

The Design thinking tool that I wanted to employ here is Learning Launch. The reason

I chose learning launch is that I basically wanted to test/experiment few ideas. I wanted to either

confirm/disconfirm an ideology/belief in that region and what else could help me testing an idea

other that learning launch.

Application:

At first launch, my thinking was quite narrow as to confirm/disconfirm the idea that

income is the prime indicator of healthcare status. I decided to interview people in that village so

as to collect data. The hypothesis here was, ‘Income is not the only factor that decides the

healthcare’ and I designed a questionnaire based on the pilot interviews to test this hypothesis.

The factors that influence healthcare were assumed (Key Assumptions/hypothetically observed)

to be Drinking Water Quality, Sanitation Facility, Health Education and Awareness, Occupation

status-Income and Health Expenditure.

At Second launch, I went out to collect exhaustive data for the analysis. While collecting

data, I was quite open for a surprising factor that has an influential impact on the healthcare

status. This ensured me that I was aware of my confirmation bias and I was more open for the

reality. The data were processed using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Studies) to test

the hypothesis. The result of the hypothesis test will give me the confirmation/disconfirmation of

the conceived notion that income is the only factor that decides the healthcare status of a region.

This is how I applied the design thinking tool-Learning Launch to test/experiment my idea

Insight:

By applying the Learning launch tool for testing my idea/Assumptions, It was observed

that the income status of the region is not the prime reason for the poor healthcare exhibit of the

village. The factors which I assumed such as Sanitation facility, Health Education also played

their parts (with the help of Factor Analysis). Thus Learning Launch provided me the basement

where I can go on and test my idea. And to my surprise, it also helped me in unveil one more

factor that plays a role in deciding the healthcare status of a village: Geographical influence and

the industrial density. These Insights that popped out of this design thinking exercise, I believe,

will be very useful for those rural community-thanks to Design Thinking.

Approach:

Based on these insights, I believe I need to still dig deep into each factor in the same way

I begun. A quick recap, I began this to check if income is the only factor and then assumed few

other factors and tested my hypothesis. In the same way, I will be taking each and every above

tested factor individually and I will test those factors (ideas related to those factors), in the future

launches. This exercise, I believe, will bring on so many other considerations as far as healthcare

is concerned and that will surely benefit the society.

This exercise can also be done with the help of mind mapping, where when I was doing

interview, I could have the made the candidates picture out their mind. And after that I could

have done the analysis part of those charts collected from the candidates. The challenge I felt

with this method was the literacy of the audience. The subjects were rural people and to be frank,

most of the people I interviewed weren’t good enough in writing and that makes this tool

difficult for a rural population, which is why I chose the Learning Launch tool. Thanks for the

flexible range of Design thinking tools.

