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Helio Health
Location
Austin, Texas
Date
August 2023
Project type
Service Design
Problem/Goal
How might we combine physical therapy and mental healthcare so that patients receive holistic, comprehensive support throughout their healing journey?
Customer/ User
Current and former athletes looking for an all-inclusive health space where they are impowered in their care.
Approach:
Wanted to create a space that was familiar and welcoming to athletes that would offer multiple ways of approaching their physical and mental health within one visit to the facility.
Solution
Helio-Health Center
a gym combined with a clinic that offers mental health, PT, and a physician’s care all in one building.
Upon their first visit, the client meets with a “match-maker” who helps them fill out paperwork and talks with them about their needs and goals. The client is then “matched” with a team of clinicians and therapists customized to their unique needs.
After the team has reviewed the client’s file, they meet with the client to collaborate on a personalized care plan along-side the client, answering questions and concerns.
The client returns to center for agreed upon therapies and maintenance.
My Role
As lead prototyper, I designed and executed our clinic prototype to aide in envisiong clinic feel and flow.
During this 6 day project, we conducted interviews, recruited participants, and worked as a team to do secondary research, synthesize research findings, brainstorm ideas, and generate solutions.
Helio Health is a project that seeks to integrate physical therapy and mental healthcare in order to provide patients with comprehensive support during their healing process. By combining these two essential aspects of wellness, Helio Health aims to address the whole person, not just their physical symptoms, and provide a more holistic approach to healthcare. The project aims to alter the gaps in care for athletes that we identified during our research and improve the overall wellbeing of patients during their rehabilitation process.
Along side a team of three other colleagues, we interviewed current and former athletes and studied their journeys through rehabilitation after sports injuries. We assessed their satisfaction with the type of care they received and designed a place to address the pain points that existed in that care system.
In collaboration with a team of three colleagues, we conducted comprehensive interviews with both current and former athletes, delving into their journeys of rehabilitation following sports injuries. Our focus was on gauging their satisfaction with the quality of care they received, ultimately leading us to conceptualize a facility aimed at addressing critical pain points within the existing healthcare system.
Our findings unearthed notable insights, revealing that athletes, well-versed in the meticulous care of their bodies during training, often found themselves with limited autonomy when it came to decisions about interventions for injury repair. Moreover, our research highlighted a notable gap in acknowledging the mind-body connection, particularly in the context of the athletes' return to the playing field. Concerns about potential reinjury and fears of not reaching their pre-injury performance levels were recurrent themes that we identified and aimed to address in our proposed design.
Our proposal was a health center that included a gym, sectioned off areas to conduct physical therapy and education about mental wellness and sports psychology, as well as, a choreographed care system that matched each athlete with a team of experts including a physical therapist, mental health specialist and an M.D. who co-create a care plan with the athlete to address their specific needs.
