☰ Jonathan Ota

Cisco CHILL

Solving the challenges of cancer care through the power of design thinking and the energy and rapid iteration of a 48 hour hackathon.

Half research and discovery, half event production.

CHILL, Cisco Hyper Innovation Learning Lab, is a group within Cisco that tackles large industry problems with a cross-section of large industry players. CHILL partnered with Gravitytank to uncover pains and discover opportunity areas within cancer care and translate those findings into a 48 hour hackathon. Unique to CHILL’s process is their emphasis on rapid prototyping and testing: teams were expected to prototype and test their ideas during multiple feedback cycles with end users. At the end of the event, the most successful ideas are turned into new start-ups to take the idea to market.

Our Goal

Uncover opportunities within oncology care and translate them into a 48 hour hackathon.

With CHILL, we sought to use the expertise of multiple complementary companies and the power of technology to find solutions that improve patient, caregiver and provider experiences in cancer care.

SECTION 01

Gathering primary inspiration, not just relying on intuition.

Key to the success of the event leaned on the meaningfulness of the problems we were trying to solve. In order to avoid the risk of topical solutions for ill-informed problems, we spent two months conducting in-depth secondary and primary research, speaking with cancer patients and their caregivers to fully understand the struggles they face everyday.

Annette and I sat in the clinic for 25 minutes waiting for chemo. The doctor was running back and forth and didn’t take time to answer our questions. The chemo sessions lasted all day long and seemed like a cattle call. We found out later it’s only a 2-hour process. It was stressful and nobody explained the issues.

The challenges of cancer care are extremely acute

1 in 2 people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

With such enormous reach, cancer care presents a huge opportunity for technology innovation — it is highly complex and expensive, it covers a wide range of chronic and acute uses cases, and it's increasingly moving outside of the hospital.

Though...

Cancer treatment is improving, but the care experience has not caught up.

Since 2015, over 60 new anticancer drugs have been approved by the FDA. While scientific advances like immunotherapy and precision medicine are rapidly changing how we treat cancer, the experience of being treated lags behind.

Opportunity Areas

The opportunities for patients face are numerous.

We summarized our learnings in six opportunities mapped to the patient journey.

SECTION 02

Translating our research insights into digital, physical, and experiential touchpoints.

Unlike other hackathons which emphasize immediate solution generating, we broke the event into two halves: research immersion and ideation and prototyping.

Digital Touchpoints

01

Patient Videos

Healthcare, especially a chronic one like cancer, is extremely personal. As such, we grounded each opportunity area in a series of videos featuring the patients we spoke with, letting event participants to directly hear their challenges.

02

Online Resource

Early on, the team recognized the need for a platform to act as the hub of information for the entire event. As a result, we used a microsite built on Squarespace as a flexible repository for us to summarize the insights from the research, share logistical details related to the event and act as a showcase for the final solutions at the conclusion of the event.

Physical Touchpoints

01

Cancer Journey

We utilized the floor to place a vinyl journey map the cancer journey for patients. The map was placed right in the middle of the event space to reinforce journey cancer patients face as event participants walked from the stage to their team spaces.

02

Ambient Immersion

Throughout Fort Mason, we placed posters highlighting quotes and images featuring our patients.

Experiential Touchpoints

01

Patient Vignettes

Throughout the floor, we created physical vignettes to help participants visualize the context in which the patient would use their solution.

02

Actual Patients

Vital to the success of the prototypes relied on the feedback teams received from actual cancer patients. Groups of cancer patients would cycle through each team to offer critique on their ideas.

03

Ambient Immersion

Each team received their own flexible work space. With moveable panels, teams could modify and create their own space to diverge and converge.

SECTION 03

Building a new business from patient focused prototyping.

All our work culminated into 48 hours of intense immersion, collaboration, rapid prototyping, and pitching.

Event Process

Design Process on Steroids

Each day was structured similarly: every team would conduct rapid rounds of ideation and prototyping with multiple quick rounds of feedback from patients and providers.

Event Process

Ideate

Gravitytank facilitators guided teams through their opportunity area, immersing them in patient challenges and steering ideation.

Event Process

Prototype

With every idea, the Build Team, a collection of Cisco engineers and Gravitytank designers, transformed them into prototypes to test with patients.

Event Process

Test

Crucial to the success of the event lay in the groups of cancer patients, caregivers and healthcare providers providing feedback to each team.

Final Pitch

My team’s idea was well received and has since then been turned into an actual product.

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