Viz.ai: Revolutionizing Clinical Trial Recruitment through Co-Design

The Scenario

Viz.ai, a growth-phase startup in healthcare, faced a critical challenge with their legacy product for clinical trial recruitment. Despite securing a new contract with a Life Science partner for a heart failure drug trial, the product lacked deep user engagement, making it difficult to identify innovation opportunities and meet sponsor expectations.

The Challenge

  • Deprecated product lacking innovation opportunities

  • Low user engagement

  • Unclear end-to-end journey

  • Difficulty in delivering on sponsor expectations

The Solution

To address these challenges, I implemented a series of co-design workshops with clinicians and administrators across multiple hospital systems. I partnered with stakeholders in Product and Biz Dev to craft the research approach and upskill them as co-facilitators.

    • Drop-in schedule: Maximized flexibility for busy healthcare workers

    • Asynchronous co-creation: Simplified service blueprint to capture multi-persona journey

    • Representative sample: Recruited participants from various roles in the clinical trials workflowon text goes here

    • 5 Principal Investigators 5

    • 6 Research Coordinators/Administrators

    • 1 Research Scientists

    • 1 Surgery Coordinators

    • 2 Clinical RNs

    • 3 Research Fellows/Postdoctoral Fellows

    Total: 18 participants across 2 days of on-site workshops

    1. Capture and clarify the end-to-end journey in clinical trials management

    2. Identify opportunity areas for innovation for product roadmap prioritization

Key Findings and Recommendations

1. Deepen User Engagement

Recommendation: Provide oversight of patients' progress toward trial completion criteria for research administrators.

2. Solve Problems for More Personas

Recommendation: Support clinic staff who drive research milestones and extend access to the recruitment product.

3. Innovate for the E2E Journey

Recommendation: Explore methods to automate clinical data capture and analysis for insights on participant drop-off and protocol bottlenecks

Impact and Milestones

  • Successfully populated the product roadmap with near and long-term milestones

  • Initiated a cross-product initiative for EHR integration

  • Introduced a new site activation approach for non-research, clinical staff

Growth Opportunities

  • Influenced roadmaps for 2 major sponsored products (~$45M projected ARR)

  • Developed a new marketing model for a comprehensive subscription package

Conclusions

We optimized the impact of our research with limited time and resources by focusing on surfacing deep insights through co-design. I favor a co-design approach when the working with experts in their field because it places the product team in a position to learn and ideate with stakeholders. As a result, this research produced more than direction for a single product roadmap. It informed the development for groundbreaking functionality for the entire suite of products.