Company: Toyota Motor North America
Partner: Alabama A&M University
Key Stakeholders: Local governments, nonprofits, and health institutions
Community: Huntsville, AL
Challenge: How can I support AAMU in addressing lack of access to healthcare for the elderly by bringing the service to Madison County in an affordable, reliable, and accessible manner for ALL community members to reduce preventative diseases within the county?
The Edmonton Heights and Colonial Hills community has a large low income and elderly population with numerous transportation challenges. Toyota partnered with Alabama A&M University to address these challenges through the Toyota Mobility Challenge. This program engages students in utilizing human centered design to address a real-world problem with innovative mobility solutions. The students conducted a needs assessment in collaboration with Toyota to identify access to healthcare a major need in the community. Toyota launched a mobile health clinic to address preventative care and provide access to healthcare for many individuals as possible. Due to the pandemic, the team converted the mobile health clinic to provide access to COVID-19 testing and vaccines for all community members.
Design Role: Project Lead
I designed the framework of the program for students and facilitated HCD workshops to engage both students and faculty in utilizing the human centered design practices. I collaborated with the Alabama A&M University students to conduct design research for the mobile health clinic, synthesized the research to identify the mobile health unit as the solution to healthcare access, and developed a strategic framework to connect mobile health patients to hospitals for additional services.
Impact of Mobile Health Unit:
2,000+ individuals tested for COVID-19 per month
1,500+ individuals vaccinated per month
% decrease in preventative illnesses (future metric to measure)
Methodology
Needs Assessment and Problem Identification
Toyota was interested in launching a university challenge with multiple universities to engage students in hands-on learning experience to address a real world problem, collaborate with universities to learn and share best practices in the realm of mobility products and services, and address mobility challenges in underserved communities to provide mobility for ALL. Through an intensive process, Alabama A&M University (AAMU) was selected by my team to understand transportation challenges of Huntsville, Alabama. I worked with the AAMU faculty to design the university challenge and recruited a team of interdisciplinary students and faculty mentors through an application & interview process. Next, I launched numerous workshops with a team of 10 students to share the human centered design process. After the workshops, the students and I worked together to begin the secondary research. The goal of the research was to understand the demographics, income data, employment data, and transportation providers of Huntsville. Next, the team and I conducted 3 focus groups and multiple interviews with community members to understand the following: Where are people traveling to access basic needs? What mode of transportation are they using? What are their transportation challenges? Through our research, we learned that the Edmonton Heights and Madison County community had a large elderly and low income population. The community had access to two major transportation providers: Orbit: operates 6 days/week across Huntsville, and Access: Paratransit service operates 5 days/week. From the focus groups, the team and I learned that there are limited public transportation options for the community and the current options are not flexible, especially for the elderly. Because Huntsville is a semi-rural area, bus stops are not in walking distance, and ADA Paratransit requires advance reservations with limitation on travel patterns (West side of town - T/TH, East side of town - M/W/F). In addition, many of the residents have low vehicle ownership, especially amongst the elderly population. Predominately, the community had limited access to grocery stores and doctors clinics. We decided to connect with the local Huntsville Hospital to understand the health and transportation challenges. The Huntsville Hospital informed the team that diabetes, blood pressure, and other preventative diseases are very common in Huntsville with limited access to care due to transportation. Based on our research, we decided to prioritize healthcare for the underserved community.
Concept Generation and Prototype Development
The AAMU team and I brainstormed and researched numerous solutions to bridge the gap in accessing healthcare. We selected a mobile health clinic and telehealth system. The goal of this solution was to bring healthcare service to the people by eliminating transportation barriers and bringing the doctors to the elderly and low income population. The second goal was to provide access to preventative healthcare check ups: provide blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, temperature, and other health check-ups. Lastly, we wanted to provide flexible healthcare access via Telehealth system that provides access to doctors for quick emergencies or visits. Once we had our solution selected, we researched trailer providers, telehealth systems, staffing for the clinic, and solar system to power trailer. Toyota engineers collaborated with both AAMU and Huntsville Hospital to design the clinic. The final design of the clinic included a trailer attached to a Toyota Tundra.
Implementation and Monitor & Evaluation
While the engineers worked on the trailer, I developed a service execution strategy with the AAMU. Toyota would provide a Tundra and funding for the mobile clinic. Huntsville Hospital and University of Alabama, Huntsville would staff the mobile health unit with doctors and nurses. AAMU would manage the operations, route management, and impact of the mobile health unit on the community. Next, I worked with AAMU to develop key metrics to measure the success of the transportation service and health impacts of mobile unit. We developed a survey for each patient to take to capture the following information: location, reason for visit, medical concerns, and service quality (in-person or virtual). We decided to collaborate with Huntsville Hospital to conduct a study to understand long-term correlations between the mobile clinic and reduction in preventative diseases in the community, if given access to proper healthcare. Unfortunately, our team hit a roadblock when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States. Madison County, like most cities in America, was experiencing a high need for COVID-19 testing sites. The AAMU and Toyota team decided to convert the mobile health unity into a testing site with telehealth access for patients. This allowed the mobile unit to quickly adapt to the needs of both the community members and hospitals in the vicinity. Later, the mobile unit supported the city of Huntsville in vaccinating its citizens against COVID-19.