Innovation
Careteam Technologies honoured by Fast Company
July 31, 2024
VANCOUVER – Careteam Technologies was selected in Fast Company’s ‘Innovation by Design Awards’ for 2024, in the User Experience category as an Honorable Mention, along with major companies such as Google, Samsung and Notion. The Innovation by Design Awards honour the designers and businesses solving the most crucial problems of today and anticipating the pressing issues of tomorrow.
The competition, now in its 13th year, features a range of blue-chip companies, emerging startups, and promising young talent. It is one of the most sought-after design awards.
“We have from day one considered making our users’ lives better as a key dimension of what we do. We focus on innovation in the technology of our platform, but also on making it easier for the humans using it – the health care providers and the patients and families,” said Dr. Alexandra T. Greenhill (pictured), the physician founder of Careteam.
“This is the opposite of the healthcare user experience of the last two decades, where well-intentioned but poorly designed health technology led to massive physician burnout and great frustration from patients. We are molding digital to enable better human connections on the path to better healthcare outcomes.”
The first two challenges were how to ensure that Careteam’s healthcare-grade enterprise platform remains user-friendly and intuitive, despite its comprehensive functionalities, and how to create a tool for clinicians that also works for patients and families.
Fueled by the belief that simplicity and functionality must coexist in design, Careteam invested heavily in co-design with providers, patients and families, user testing and feedback, continually refining the interface for optimal user experience and increasing adoption and satisfaction from both patients and families along with clinicians.
The third challenge: how to add design elements that helped people using the platform who were usually stressed – patients and families living through some of the most difficult moments in their life and their healthcare providers, where over 50% are known to be dealing with burnout.
Careteam is deployed to support complex chronic diseases such as Type 1 and 2 diabetes, cancer, aging at home, palliative care and mental health issues. The solution was to focus on the user experience in terms of tone of voice and use of human created illustrations that stand out from the proliferation of generic or artificial intelligence (AI) generated images.
Careteam invested in an original take on the style of the drawings, the choice of characters and scenes as well as the colour palette. Depicting diversity goes to more than just gender and skin tone, it is also hairstyles, clothing and positioning.
Working with Irene Neyman, a remarkably talented illustrator who arrived in Canada when escaping the war in Ukraine, led to the development of a unique collection of people and objects that add a human dimension to the digital environment.
“This year’s honorees show how essential creativity is to the process of innovation,” said Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “It’s inspiring to see how some of the best minds across industries are using design to shape our world for the better.”
The judges of the 2024 Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards include renowned designers from a variety of disciplines, business leaders from some of the most innovative companies in the world, and Fast Company’s own writers and editors. Entries are judged on the key ingredients of innovation: functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, cultural impact, and business impact.
Winners, finalists, and honorable mentions can be seen online on the Fast Company website https://www.fastcompany.com/91129827/user-experience-innovation-by-design-2024
About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with their sister publication Inc. For more information, visit www.fastcompany.com.
About Careteam Technologies
Careteam is a physician-founded tech company that is focused on improving healthcare delivery by closing the gaps of what usually happens to what is possible, especially for complex chronic conditions. The company’s innovative platform enables healthcare providers to communicate and collaborate with patients, families and other health providers more effectively, improving patient care quality, safety, outcomes and satisfaction while reducing costs and supporting provider health and well-being. The Careteam platform was developed with support from the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI), Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), Startup Health, National Research of Canada (NRC)’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), BC TECH, Innovate BC, New Ventures BC, DIGITAL, Scale AI, MITACS, MaRS Discovery District, Canadian Trade Commissioner programs, MATTER, AARP Innovation Labs and Genome BC. For more information, visit www.getcareteam.com.