ZoCo’s Commitment to Healthcare: A Letter from our Founder

Healthcare is complex, and building successful products in this space is challenging. The industry is fragmented, highly regulated, and the humans involved have competing needs and incentives. Healthcare is riddled with human factors like fear, trust, stigma, and overwhelm—and all these things muddle together to create a tangled web which is hard to unravel.

I have lived these challenges throughout my adult life, both personally and professionally. I've experienced the pain directly, and have been a champion for solving it through research and design. Why is this important?

I am excited to announce that ZoCo Design is focusing our work in healthcare, and committing our service to the builders who are trying to improve it.

This has been a long time coming. Across our 11 year history, ZoCo has served the many corners of the healthcare ecosystem—from redesigning provider workflows, to improving pharmacy data systems, to envisioning the future of patient care in emergency rooms, to designing software that analyzes data (RWD) to inform clinical trials—and we’ve facilitated this work across clients of all shapes and sizes: major healthcare systems, innovative startups, and healthcare distribution giants, to name a few. 

Health has been the predominant industry ZoCo has served across every year of business since 2013. If over a decade of reps wasn't enough, I've embraced this field long before I started my product design and research career. In fact, my first job was working as an X-ray tech, biller, and scheduler in a small-town chiropractic office. Later, I'd work for my aunt's home health company in the summers, and eventually I took on a stint in pharmaceutical sales to bolster my comfort talking to strangers before starting ZoCo.

But my working career aside, I’ve experienced the fractures, the opaqueness, and the misaligned incentives that plague the industry in my own health journey. At 22, I was told I had Narcolepsy—a debilitating and deteriorating sleep condition where my only choice was controlled substances and decline—until I realized through my own relentless advocacy I had other options. I lost my dad to curable cancer when I was 25, because his medical records didn’t transfer across state lines. I’ve faced autoimmune challenges, frustrating misdiagnoses that nearly led to catastrophic decisions, and a mess of conflicting data that has left my providers confused and out of sync. The human body is complicated. And the US healthcare system? Perhaps more so.

So why double down? 

Healthcare affects each and every one of us, and we all have our own stories of pain and triumph. These challenges mean we need more focus on empathy and systems thinking to figure it all out. We need minds that are equally analytical, empathetic, intuitive, and creative. We need researchers and designers. 

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ZoCo is uniquely poised to continue serving this industry because:

• People are the heart of healthcare. Whether we’re talking about patients, providers, payers, pharmacy, and beyond, these people all have experiences, make decisions, and act over time. ZoCo’s focus on human factors, service design, and UX means we can identify the meaning behind all of this behavior—and what can be done to influence it. We remove ambiguity behind data, so our clients can choose what to do next and predict what each choice could bear. 
• We match what people want with what the business needs. We understand creating value must move the business metrics that matter most. UX plays a critical role in impacting both user success, and the financial health of your organization—driving key metrics like patient engagement and satisfaction, adherence, provider efficiency, and really any metric that is driven by the choices and behavior of people.
• Our healthcare experience runs deep. There are unique challenges in healthcare. From HIPAA compliance, to SDoH, to overcoming recruitment barriers for research, to competing incentives—we have faced these challenges often enough they are now muscle memory. Our deep roots means we come up to speed quickly, readily navigate red tape, and add value you can trust.

Why now? 

We’re planting the flag we were already carrying. 

We’ve been prioritizing human-centered tech and healthcare throughout our history, where our biggest fans and brightest wins are in this space. We’ve impacted millions of lives and supported all types of people in their health journeys—improving provider retention in senior care, simplifying patient medication access, and even designing software deployed across Feeding America’s vast network that supports the food insecure. We are proud and excited to continue this journey, with more intention than ever before. 

The future of healthcare is being written now, and ZoCo is excited to add our unique contributions to the space through untapped insight and experience design. To the dreamers and the doers who are working through all of healthcare’s complex challenges, let’s meet. Whether I can be a thought partner to connect the dots and help bolster your success, or you’re seeking research and design expertise, we’re eager to collaborate with like-minded leaders.

We’ll still continue our work with our beloved partners outside of health, as our strengths in this space run parallel to similar industries—from SaaS, to Insurance, to Fintech, to Marketplaces and more. Afterall, health isn’t the only service-driven, people-rich, regulated, and multi-sided industry. To all of our current and recent clients: If we’ve been working together in the trenches, we love you, and are stoked to continue our shared journey. We believe our healthcare focus will only add more value.

Let’s get to it. Together, we have so much to unravel, simplify, and improve.