Living Labs Initiative

By Medical Devices and Health Technologies

PATH’s Living Labs Initiative accelerates the pace of health innovation to ensure that all communities have the solutions they need to live healthy lives. We do this by co-creating with users to rapidly design, test, and scale solutions to their long-standing challenges.

Our Approach

PATH’s Living Labs Initiative uses human-centered design to work with end users to co-develop solutions aimed at accelerating the pace of innovation, lowering risk, and increasing the likelihood of realizing sustainable solutions. Through PATH's world-renowned expertise in global health and longstanding relationships with governments and communities, we have built a strong reputation as a trusted partner and can help to rapidly engage with key stakeholders to help deliver lasting results.

We use a '4D' approach to human-centered design: discover, define, dream, design. We iterate at the design stage until a solution is developed that is acceptable to the end users.

Livings Labs staff interview health workers to understand their daily work and the challenges they face. Hearing their stories allows for co-designing solutions that will meet their needs. Photo: PATH

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Observation is a key part of the human-centered design process. Creative designers seek to understand the current processes and support the co-creation of solutions appropriate for the context of use. Photo: PATH/Brian Mushaukwa

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Stakeholders from all levels of the health system, including health officials, nurses, community health workers, and community members, are brought together in workshops to discuss health challenges and brainstorm solutions. Photo: PATH

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To develop a deep understanding of users, workshop participants create an empathy map that describes what the user sees, hears, says, and does in their work environment. Photo: PATH

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An approach used by the Living Labs Initiative is the creation of journey maps to look at current processes and opportunities for improvement. This journey map details the work of a frontline immunization worker.

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The Living Labs team uses Miro, an online collaboration platform, to document and analyze information gathered through workshops, interviews, and observations. This Miro board documents parts of a human-centered design sprint cycle.

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Our human-centered design and user-focused approaches support the goal of creating solutions that are tailored to the needs of users and contribute to solving complex health challenges. Photo: PATH/Brian Mushaukwa

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What we do

Designing Solutions: Living Labs collaborates with users to drive the iterative development of co-created solutions to address their most critical health-related challenges.

Exploring Concepts: Living Labs engages users to obtain feedback on initial concepts, exploring what resonates across the healthcare spectrum before developing tailored solutions.

Testing Prototypes: Living Labs tests health prototypes or solutions with end users across different settings to inform what is working and what can be improved.

The Livings Labs team members are experts in three service areas: Designing Solutions, Exploring Concepts, and Testing Prototypes. Examples of our offerings in each service area are described in the above graphic.

Example Projects

Engaging frontline immunization workers

Location: Kenya and Zambia.

Service area: Designing Solutions

Challenge: Numerous health system and technological improvements have helped frontline health workers increase vaccine coverage, but a key challenge is often overlooked—health worker engagement and motivation.

Our approach: Livings Labs in Kenya and Zambia are engaging immunization workers in a human-centered design process to uncover solutions that can build on their professional goals to learn and improve, gain more job satisfaction, and achieve increased uptake of immunization services.

Intended impact: This project aims to test hundreds of solutions for strengthening health worker motivation and engagement to drive increased vaccine coverage.

We are engaging with frontline immunization workers to understand their barriers to delivering vaccines and co-creating solutions that can increase their motivation and productivity. Photo: PATH/Brian Mushaukwa

Identifying solutions to prevent and manage postpartum hemorrhage (PPH)

Location: Kenya.

Funder: MSD for Mothers.

Service area: Designing Solutions

Challenge: PPH is a top contributor to maternal mortality globally, and health workers need appropriate solutions to reduce these preventable deaths.

Our approach: Living Labs is engaging health care workers to understand barriers and opportunities associated with prevention and management of PPH. By sharing learnings, the team will help inform the Ministry of Health’s future PPH interventions.

Intended impact: Ultimately, this project will influence solutions adopted by the Ministry of Health to reduce maternal mortality associated with PPH in Kenya.

Through the Living Labs Initiative, nurses in maternity wards in Kenya were interviewed to help inform solutions that could reduce preventable maternal deaths related to postpartum hemorrhage. Photo: PATH/Sue Wairimu