Flipping the narrative on end-of-life care
How to solve a sensitive topic
Dr. Michael Madison has been practicing Interventional Neuroradiology for the past 35 years, specializing in patients suffering from strokes. He has seen countless families wade through the murky waters of making care directives on behalf of their loved ones. Undefined end-of-life care leaves decision-making to grief-stricken family members and physicians making their best guess.
PROBLEM
End-of-life care is a sensitive topic that can be put off until it’s too late. In fact, roughly only one-third of adults in the United States have completed some form of advanced care planning.
SOLUTION
Together, we designed and built a HIPAA-compliant platform with a more human approach that eases the end-of-life decision-making process.
RESULT
With a mission to increase advance care planning completion rates, Thanacare’s platform enables healthcare professionals and their patients to capture, certify, and make accessible their healthcare directives and wishes.
Complete vision design
The tech wasn’t the only element Thanacare wanted to reimagine. If they were going to accomplish their mission, they would need to be uniquely identifiable and yet reassuringly familiar. Thanacare needed a brand that spoke to its concierge and human approach to end-of-life care. Foundry set forth marrying the message, tone, and compassionate nature of the company to a new visual identity. The unique relationship between Foundry’s product and brand designers allowed them to build a visual language they could directly apply to the new product wireframes. This cooperation allowed for a rand that would not only meet the visionary requirements of the project but the functional as well.
Foundry developed a color palette and wordmark in collaboration with the Thanacare team to speak to their unique qualities. An infinity logo was interwoven within the name itself to symbolize the ever-lasting care provided to each individual. The branding marries perfectly with the new products' simplicity and elegance.
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Work smarter, not harder
Through many iterations, conversations, and a TON of sketches, the teams created the initial envisionment of Thanacare. The team knew the platform had to offer concierge-level service coupled with a more easy-to-track and maintain system of records. The new onboarding process improves intake efficiency and it lets Thanacare focus on providing more human communication with their clients. Simplified legal workflows would reduce the necessity for extraneous tooling and technology allowing customers' information to remain under one, more secure, umbrella.
From paper to practice
Knowing the requirements of future feature implementations, Foundry engineers established an extensible and scalable platform. Through intelligent integration with tools like DocuSign, the team minimized the manual processes and work on each client’s behalf. When approaching such a difficult topic, it is important to reduce the effort every step of the way. The new system supports the entire process, ensuring every care directive is accessible for each emergent care opportunity.
“[We] developed a great partnership with Foundry. Their dedication to Thanacare’s mission of providing a graceful death for all is evident in their craft and thoughtfulness of technology that makes it possible to fulfill on a crucial mission.”
SAM MADISON, MBA
THANACARE VICE PRESIDENT
Services Recap
Strategy
Product Workshop
Competitive Research
Feature Prioritization
Design
UX/UI Design
Prototyping
Visual Identity
Development
React
Typescript
Ruby
Rails
Postgres
AWS (SQS, RDS, S3)
