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Design for Impact Lab: Life Spring

Thu 03 May 2012
Life Spring Logo
At Unite for Sight's 2012 conference, Design that Matters (DtM) held a Design for Impact Lab with Tricia Morente, strategic consultant to LifeSpring Maternity Hospitals, and Eleni Vlachos, project lead from partner organization IPIHD - Innovative Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery. LifeSpring has an innovative for-profit model to provide high quality, affordable delivery and pre/post-natal care to women and their newborns living in the slums of India. As part of their system, outreach workers provide community education about women's health and visit women in their homes to check on their health and answer questions, while also collecting demographic information about the women.

During the session, DtM shared a set of innovation planning tools that can help LifeSpring implement a flexible mobile phone platform with an initial focus on improving efficiency of their outreach workers. We created a step-by-step diagram hypothesizing how LifeSpring will move to their desired outcomes of increased profitability and broadening social impact by helping more mothers. Then, we helped Tricia generate and prioritize some of the assumptions underlying this plan and figure out how to test some of the most critical factors early and often. After the session, Tricia commented, "I just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU for a wonderful workshop. I learned a lot and am excited to bring these lessons back to LifeSpring. You have me inspired to learn more about design thinking!"

Life Spring Impact Lab

Elizabeth Johansen of Design that Matters (left) helps Tricia Morente of LifeSpring Maternity Hospitals (right) place several mHealth program assumptions on a prioritization grid during our Design for Impact Lab at Unite for Sight.

ABOUT DESIGN FOR IMPACT LABS
Design that Matters’ Design for Impact Lab offering gives social enterprises a chance to get valuable advice from experts in design thinking methodologies. Over the course of 1 hour, the Design that Matters team tackles a challenge of the organization’s choosing ranging from how to conduct inspiring user research to detailed engineering problem-solving.
technologies that increase income and/or improve health.

ABOUT LIFESPRING MATERNITY HOSPITALS
Expanding opportunities for lower-income women to access affordable, high quality maternal care is at the heart of LifeSpring Hospitals. The cost of traditional private hospitals is out of reach of many Indians. LifeSpring provides its customers with choices and care that recognize their dignity. Through LifeSpring’s model of small hospitals (20-25 beds) and prices significantly below market rates, LifeSpring has achieved financial sustainability and social impact. LifeSpring aims to serve as a model for providing high quality maternal and child health services to the poor in India and worldwide.

Learn more about Life Spring Maternity Hospital

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