Design Mind frogcast Ep.63 – The Next Frontier of Healthcare

On this episode of the Design Mind frogcast, we join Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Consumer Experience and Design at Sanofi, and Ross Landles, Vice President, Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog as they explore how AI is changing the way patients understand their health, make decisions and move through care. Their conversation examines patient centricity, the shifting foundations of trust and how intelligent healthcare can advance without losing its human core.

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Episode Transcript:

Design Mind frogcast

Episode 63: The Next Frontier of Healthcare

Guests: Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Consumer Experience and Design at Sanofi; Ross Landles, Vice President, Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog

[00:00:00] Elizabeth Wood: Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what’s next in the world of products, services and experiences, both here at frog and far, far outside the pond. I’m Elizabeth Wood.

Today on our show, we’re exploring what happens when AI meets one of the most human experiences we all share: healthcare. To do this, you’ll hear a conversation between our expert guests, Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Digital Consumer Experience at Sanofi and Ross Landles, Vice President and Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog.

Together, they’ll discuss patient centricity, trust and the future of care. They’ll also unpack why patients are beginning to approach healthcare differently, how AI is reshaping expectations and behaviors and what it takes to design experiences that feel both intelligent and deeply human.

Here’s their conversation now.

[00:00:59] Ross Landles: My name is Ross Landles. I’m the Vice President and Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog and my focus is our healthcare work and practice in that space.

Sylvia, we had a chance to talk at South by Southwest London. We were talking about frontier behaviors, emerging behaviors, how patients were starting to think about using AI to reshape the care they get, the healthcare system that is around them. And we thought it’d be super interesting to explore the same topics on Design Mind. But we thought we’d back into it. It’d be great to hear a little bit about you. You head up consumer experience at the world’s leading pharmaceutical business. It’d be great to understand how you think about consumer experience, the impact it can create for patients, and maybe to help start that off, it’d be great if you could bring to life yourself in your own words what you do and your focus.

[00:01:49] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: I’m Sylvia Park-Ekecs. I am Global Head of Digital Consumer Experience at Sanofi, leading the team that brings human-centered design thinking to healthcare innovation. Always asking, how does this improve a consumer’s life? From our scientists to patients. So, my role really centers around on ensuring that everything we design end-to-end, from digital to patient support solutions.

[00:02:18] Ross Landles: Maybe tell us a little bit about your backstory. I mean, Head of Consumer Experience at Sanofi, how did you arrive at such a destination?

[00:02:26] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, truly for me it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, really. It’s that I’ve been very privileged in my journey to be able to have a chance to work with such a various industry’s brightest and the most talented folks like yourself, actually, Ross, and you know, learn and explore more, right? So, my background is I started as a communication designer, and then along the way, my mentor has told me about technology and the human-centeredness of things. Whatever we create, the experience, whether it’s through touch, seeing, feeling, really is human communication. We should do it from their perspective, not creating it and just give it to them and go, “Oh, you will use this.” So, these are some of the things that really helped me to navigate and be able to work in various industries, from entertainment to consumer devices to education and now in healthcare. Really, what I would call, I dare say, kind of less “frontier” in a sense, more conservative. Rightfully so, because this is, we’re dealing with human lives and taking it to the next level, especially in the age of AI. That’s going to help us really take us to the next level that we haven’t seen before.

[00:03:56] Ross Landles: I think frontier is going to be what we want to explore today as we think about, not just novel research, you know, we’ve been involved in thinking through how people are responding to AI, I guess, age, taking this into their lives, how they’re responding in terms of new behaviors, new healthcare opportunities, but also sort of new impacts. Tell us a little bit about the impact that you focus on at Sanofi.

[00:04:19] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Traditionally, when we talk about user experience, we talk a lot about, you know NPS, user satisfaction scores and usability scores and whatnot. But it’s also about the business outcomes. The real impact shows up in retention, life cycle and the value and of course, the reduced cost in services and it influences the revenue by experience quality that we deliver. So, as experienced leaders as we are, we should really be able to tie every major initiative to a P&A as well. So, on other areas is that we’re looking at enterprise-wide experience architecture. So, this is not only about one segment, one area. It really should be setting the global standards, journey maps and the principle that we have that creates the experience DNA, right? That ties together from the product to marketing to service to digital. So, it’s an ecosystem that our customers feel as one company instead of multiple things.

And another one is human-centered AI governance. I know there’s a lot of RAISE framework and AI governance, but we also need to think about the human-centered AI governance, right? So, this is where we have the one Sanofi experience strategy that leads to the AI deployment as well. So, how do we set up the guardrail where the automation helps versus where it erodes the trust and owning the moments that must stay with human? I dare to say that “human-in-the-loop” may not be sufficient. Human in control is the way to go, in my opinion. Just because the AI is changing so much and we’ll go deeper into this. But I honestly don’t know how it’s going to take the form or shape. But I think we need to do it together. And of course, with so much changing happening, you know, to build that culture and capability to bring it user-centered, I think that building design fluency and the customer obsession throughout the broader organization through training rituals and shared metrics and outlasting any single initiative, we’ve got to build it together. And of course, the market positioning external signals shaping how the industry defines good experience in healthcare. I think that’s something that you and I discussed about what is that, right? And how do we do it? And through the thought leadership, of course, you know the recognition, award-caliber, quality and work and then the talents in the market. How do we hire and how do we shift together and bring the best of the best talent? And we can’t do it alone through strong partnerships to build communities and realizing it together.

[00:07:33] Ross Landles: We’ve been partnering now for six years, and you’ve been on this mission around patient-centricity and focused on experience. Like when you think about those patients, when you think about who you’re trying to touch with Sanofi? What does that impact mean to you personally?

[00:07:49] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: I think what that means personally for me is that when I mean, every single one of us is a patient one time or the other, right? And that means really getting better, feeling better. That’s the outcome, right? Because we’re using, let’s face it, we might be using buzzwords, we’re doing incredible work with incredible science that works and how we can help facilitate to make the duration of patients’ experience better, as well as helping our healthcare providers get the scientific data that they need to diagnose all the way, but the bottom line is really making the impact for the patients to feel better and get well as soon as possible, so that they can go back to enjoying their life. To me, that’s what it means to bring a great experience in healthcare.

[00:08:45] Ross Landles: How do you see healthcare being shaped or reshaped or reinvented right now?

[00:08:50] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Patients, we the people, are now benchmarking healthcare against other apps that they use, such as banking, their food delivery, to their online purchase like e-commerce, but not against other healthcare such as hospitals, right? So healthcare is shifting from provider-centric, which seems to be fragmented system and is reactive to a point to patient-centric, which should be proactive and unified. And care itself is moving out of the four walls of the clinic and into the patient’s home. That’s what we’re seeing and that means the friction that used to be tolerated such as, if I get sick, three phone calls to refill prescription to re-entering the same information at every visit reads as quality defect, not as an inconvenience. So, the shift in expectation of the patients and the users are changing. So, underneath it all, also there is a concern and, you know, the trust issue—trust is one constant that holds across all pretty much age groups in every setting. Even a generational device shows how differently people experience care. From grandparents to the grandkids, right? So, it’s really happening while, I hate to say it, but there is always a budget and that tightens. It’s a complicated matter and patient experience programs and also the community are coming under renewed scrutiny as hospitals adjust to reduce funding with troubling early signs that patient experience expertise is being cut disproportionately. So, the irony is that the moment patients need experience to hold the system together, the function responsible for it is fighting for its budget line sometimes and I do get it, we do live in reality, so, it’s the balance of things.

[00:10:52] Ross Landles: Trust in healthcare, trust in, say, science has never been so low and so impacted. Again, when we looked at the research that we’ve just done, people are starting to trust these new tools, perhaps beyond actually the kind of the foundations they’ve created, like perhaps beyond what they’ve actually kind of maybe merited. We saw that for relatively sort of pro users of AI, that they started to show trust of the recommendations comparable to that of their primary healthcare professional. It’s starting to see some of the implications for people in terms of okay, well then reshaping their behavior because of this. So, it’s interesting, isn’t it? These new tools where people are starting to, more quickly than we’ve seen before, start to scale their kind of, not just their trust, but their kind of basing their actions basing their behaviors on the recommendations.

[00:11:43] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, very true. And also, you know where the data source is coming from and consistency. That’s how we build trust, right?

[00:11:51] Ross Landles: Exactly.

[00:11:52] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: So, clean data, and when you say you’re going to show up, you’ve got to show up on a regular basis.

[00:11:58] Ross Landles: Probably one of the gaps and one of the areas that we can play as sort of people providing digital health is to think about you know how do we extend the evidence base and the database of the LLMs and provide more of that real world insight or that real world, or that clinical insight, so that so that these recommendations are really truly useful for people, for practitioners, and for people. So, patient experience has become really central to Sanofi’s strategy. It’s a really important part of healthcare more broadly. Why do you think that’s happened?

[00:12:32] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: I think you know we also have seen in many other industries as well, right? When you put the user experience at the center core as a part of the strategy, you come up at top, right? It’s more than just satisfaction score. It really needs to become a business survival metric. Because the great product and service experience is one of the key competitive advantages and business metrics that any business, any industry can build. Cost clarity is also one of the biggest drivers of the trust. Nearly 42% of adults have avoided health care altogether because of the potential cost. That’s not a soft metric. That’s lost revenue and delayed diagnosis, which is more important, right? Over 83% of patients will only consider a provider with at least a four-star rating, and more than half will avoid a provider with no reviews at all. So, things are shifting. So, the experience now sits directly in the acquisition funnel, not just retention, and AI raises the stakes. As healthcare automates more of the patient journey, clinicians want their organizations deploying AI with these same values they bring to medicine. Benefit without harm, transparency, patience and informal caregivers, including them, and clear accountability throughout this complicated journey, which means the experience now is the mechanism that keeps AI honest from end-to-end. It’s central because it is the only function that positions to hold both the commercial outcome and the trust outcome at once.

[00:14:21] Ross Landles: In our own practice, what we see is, the providers are really looking for teams like Sanofi or kind of pharma teams to come with their experience of the patient, the care pathway, how to find the right patients, how to support them through diagnosis and how to help them as they go on potentially quite a complex long-term treatment schedule and regime and actually what we see, and I guess this is sort of reflected in the work we’ve done together, is just supporting people through what can be highly complex first-time ever experience that they’re going to go through to get to health is not something that the providers are able to do at scale across the complexity of all the therapy areas, all the diseases. Where really pharma has the expertise and thinking about these patients, empathizing with them who are trying to go through, again this first-time experience, we can bring a lot of value by understanding that journey, by understanding those moments, and supporting people through it.

[00:15:16] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah.

[00:15:17] Ross Landles: Sylvia, we see that you’re having a lot of impact. How do you think about the role that design, human-centered thinking, what can it realistically achieve within the context of pharma today?

[00:15:28] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Patients, when they go through the experience, it’s not black or white. It’s life. It’s kind of gray. This can happen. And I think you talked about journey. What is a journey like? Journey is never straightforward, like 100-meter dash. It’s a marathon. Sometimes you go around. And I think at every moment that matters and that patients’ needs are, that’s when we can quickly serve the data and touchpoints that make sense, that’s useful. I think that’s where the power of the design and human-centered design thinking will really help, because we’re putting ourselves in the actual patient and users’ shoes so that we come up with the solution that they need, not the other way around. And there is also a gap, though, that we’ve seen from between AI investment and AI impact at the moment, right? But the things are changing superfast here. The latest stat that I’ve come to see is that more than 80% of organizations are not seeing tangible enterprise-level earnings impact from generative AI. And honest diagnosis is that the disconnect isn’t the technology. It’s that AI experiences aren’t being designed to resonate with the humans, the people who have to actually use them. That’s the realistic opening for design. Not owning the molecules, because we’re not the scientists. Not owning the algorithm, but owning the translation between the layers, between clinical and scientific complexity and human trust, and building the AI-enhanced support that pairs the predictive insight with clean data with human empathy, so the recommendation feels personally relevant, not just medically correct. I think that’s a huge role that we can play.

[00:17:35] Ross Landles: Yeah, I mean that makes so much sense to us. When we were looking at this space, we saw that in many domains, AI can have a 95% accuracy for diagnostics. There was a randomized clinical trial looking at the effectiveness of an AI tool. 95% accuracy in a kind of synthetic setting, but when it was used by patients in a kind of patient-centered manner, like they were self-directing this diagnosis, it dropped to 35%. And what struck me was the point you made around end-to-end, because I think again the team involved hadn’t considered, what is the pre-journey to me trying to have this moment, this experience, etc., how do I then take this forward and then integrate it with care that I’m supposed to be receiving like the different channels that would go through and as you say, whether it’s in the enterprise or if it’s in in the kind of world with kind of people trying to receive care, this end-to-end thinking is critical to embed that precise tool, that capability into a moment that’s going to actually deliver value for people.

[00:18:37] Elizabeth Wood: We’re going to take a short break. When we return, Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Digital Consumer Experience at Sanofi, and Ross Landles, VP and Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog, discuss patient-centricity, the changing role of clinicians and why AI adoption is fundamentally a human experience story.

[00:19:25] Elizabeth Wood: Now back to Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Digital Consumer Experience at Sanofi, and Ross Landles, Vice President and Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog.

[00:19:34] Ross Landles: Sylvia, Sanofi has chosen to make patient centricity a strategic commitment and a necessity for the business. How did you shape that commitment? How did you think about it? Why did you do that?

[00:19:45] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, because at Sanofi patients are truly at the heart of everything we do. It’s not just a slogan. It’s how research decisions get made. The company defines is precisely the patient-centric R&D means a commitment to listen and translate patients’ insights into actions that develop new healthcare solutions with meaningful outcomes addressing unmet needs and improving health-related quality of life. So, the distinction that we draw are subtle but very important. We don’t work for patients; we work with them. Treating the patient community as equal partners rather than end users of a finished product, we believe human plus AI equals greater impact. That’s the equation that we live by. Sanofi is, we’re all in AI, but the commitment only means something if experience leads that adoption, not the other way around. So, patient-centricity is the proof point. It’s what keeps innovation honest.

[00:20:55] Ross Landles: This commitment to patient-centricity is both a way of working with people to develop new solutions, but also a driver of the fundamental, like both patient outcomes, but also fundamental business outcomes. And it’s like it’s the two-sided equation that you guys get to focus on and are making impact around.

[00:21:13] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: We always start with understanding the patient. We discover, we design and we develop and deploy.

[00:21:57] Ross Landles: What does patient-centricity actually look like in practice?

[00:21:22] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: In practice, it’s more structural, right? Because it is operational. So, we built the patient community promise, a set of commitments developed with input from over 80 patients and caregiver organizations worldwide, endorsed by the executive committee itself. So, the company’s own patent charter is explicit that this goes beyond the patient alone. It formalizes accountability to both patient and caregiver communities. This also includes informal caregiver. The family members and friends and so on, engaging them systematically at every stage of the medicine and vaccine lifecycle. That caregiver inclusion is baked into how we define the community it serves. Patient-centricity to us means intentionally listening to individuals living with disease, their caregivers and credible advocacy voices that translates what’s heard into meaningful actions. Now here’s where I’ll add my own personal belief on top of what’s shared. I’ll say that the next part, this part, total transparency is my perspective, not company’s. The informal caregiver is the most under-designed-for person in the entire healthcare system. But they’re the ones managing medication schedules, nutrition, diet, translating clinical language, at 2 am holding the emotional weight of the patient, that patients can’t always carry alone and almost no experience strategy in the industry is built around them in a systematic way. It’s not only about the patient; it’s about the whole ecosystem—informal and formal caregivers, the healthcare providers, navigating fragmented systems, the hospitals, trying to coordinate care, tests, across the silos. The real patient-centricity, in my humble opinion, means designing for the entire web of people who make a patient’s recovery possible together. That’s my conviction, and I think it’s the next frontier the industry hasn’t fully claimed yet. But I really believe that there are more and more folks recognizing it and we’re moving toward this.

[00:23:57] Ross Landles: We’ve been in this journey together and what’s quite clear is it’s not just a moment; it’s an ongoing journey, it’s a reinvention. Why do you see this as an ongoing journey, not like a one-off transformation?

[00:24:09] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Life science is, right now, is where the internet was in the mid ’90s, I dare say. So, we’re at the beginning stage. .And everyone feels it’s going to change everything, but almost nobody has seen the shape of that change yet, right? Because it’s too early on, and we heard it even from the tech leaders who are at the forefront of the AI frontier. They’re saying, “Hey, life science is one area that they foresee is going to be tremendously change with the powerful computing, like supercomputing, as well as the, you know, scientific data coming together. We can really accelerate that.” Right? And calling this moment a more of a transformation implies before and after to me. To me that means there is a beginning and the end, and I don’t believe that’s what’s happening. It’s going to be a continuous journey because all the emerging tech will come. At the moment, as we know, AI has been around since I believe 1955, but natural language, LLM, all these really change the world. So, these are the tools that help us evolve faster than how we understand how people are going to use them. So, there’s a little bit of a speedometer of differential there. So, every time when AI gets better at prediction, the personalization and automation at the touchpoint, the human-centered questions like “who’s going to use it?” it needs to reset. So that balance, keeping that is little difficult, but we haven’t figured it out yet. So, we have to ask some of these questions, right? Does this still feel like care, or does it start to feel like process? Does it still build trust, or does it quietly erode things? I mean, these questions don’t get answered once, they get asked again every time when technology evolves. So that’s why I think you know it’s a journey, not a project. Even with AI in healthcare, we can accelerate. For example, I do not believe that clinical trial periods can be accelerated because that’s human factors. When you try some new medicine, it takes time for actual physical human bodies to process it and that’s how we’re going to learn and it’s the same thing from psychological as well, right? So, the human interaction, you can’t rush that. That’s another point why I think this is a continuous, ongoing journey and this, I think we need to figure out the timing of it, so that we don’t all get excited about shiny new technology. “Oh my god, we can do this and we can do that.” That’s wonderful. But in order to make a real impact, we need to take the proper time, especially with the people who are going to actually use it.

[00:27:14] Ross Landles: We researched some of the frontier behaviors that people are having around new AI tools and one of the things that emerged is actually this kind of split cohort, which I guess we’ve seen in most technology rollouts. We see this kind of advanced user group who feels somewhere between 30% to 50% more confident, comfortable acting alone given AI advice, they feel more optimism based on the AI consultation, they feel higher trust in its outcomes and then you have another cohort who is much less comfortable using these tools is much less frequently using them in their regular life and obviously those metrics are significantly different. I think one of the things that teams like ours are going to have to do is really think through, okay, there is very naturally going to be a new digital AI divide as we try and roll out these tools and support people in increasingly sophisticated ways using AI. So, how do we design for both the people at the front, at the leading edge, and also the tailing edge and make sure that we don’t have another kind of cohort of people who have a care gap, who have don’t have the same access to the right care because of these possibilities.

[00:28:29] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Absolutely. It’s always about the people. And new technology, these new tools are here to help people’s experience and improve quality of life, right? The moment we start designing for technology first and the person second, we lost the plot. That’s the thread that has to hold, no matter what comes next. It’s about the people.

[00:28:55] Ross Landles: We recently spoke together at South by Southwest London. We looked at how patient behaviors are evolving in the age of AI and we did some research on that to complement, I think, some of the great attitudinal work that was out there. So, what we saw, there are many, many good research or kind of demographic population level firms thinking about how people’s attitudes to AI in healthcare, but we didn’t see so many people really focusing on new behaviors and so we wanted to focus on that as a company, we felt that we had something that we could bring to that. We ran a study with 1,000 participants in the US, 250 people in the UK and we focused it on AI users. So, we knew we were deliberately going for people who were already starting to use AI tools and the reason for that is we wanted to look what was happening at the frontier and to use some of that understanding to be able to bring back into our work together as leaders in AI and healthcare and also to be able to talk and evangelize within the industry. We looked at three lenses: trust, agency and pathways. So, let’s start to explore some of those: trust. So, we think about this AI movement. Sylvia, is healthcare entering an era where trust is earned for experience rather than simply expertise alone?

[00:30:15] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: AI adoption is fundamentally a human experience story, not a technology story, in my opinion, because experts used to be enough on its own, like a clinician’s credential, a brand’s pedigree and whatnot. But because patients have no other way to evaluate quality previously, but now patients are comparing every healthcare interaction to the best consumer-grade digital experience that they use daily. If the experience feels clumsy, fragmented, or cold, expertise alone doesn’t save it. They have options. They’re going to get up and go. So, the trust gets built moment-by-moment through how the experience actually feels to navigate, giving the promise and showing up every single time. So that means experience design is not anymore, a nice-to-have. It’s becoming one of the clearest ways healthcare brands differentiate themselves from each other.

[00:31:26] Ross Landles: We’re entering an age where, for heavy AI users, what we saw in our research was that the doctor still remains the most trusted source overall. Eighty-five percent of people stated their behaviors would be shaped by their trust in their doctor. But for people who are kind of pro-users of AI, the advice they’re getting from the LLMs, from their chatbots, rises to the second-most trusted source, right above public health messaging, above friends and family, even. And so, the question I think for experienced designers is how do we leverage that into the best advice possible, the end-to-end way to manage people through the care pathway which they may be choosing for themselves and how do we start to think about the experiences we provide people downstream of this trust that they have in these new tools and the advice they’re getting, bringing together different perspectives, their own medical information, best practice, etc.

[00:32:23] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Perhaps it’s also because many of the AI tools, if they’re good ones, will share the data source. Patients can easily see where the sources are coming from and they can double click and go into it and dig deeper if they choose to and I think that transparency is really making the big difference, right? Before the internet, everybody had to go to the library and had to read everything and people don’t have time. So of course, they’re going to trust also the healthcare providers because they are the experts. But now, patients have that ability in seconds to be able to access the data from the trusted sources, and I think that’s making a big difference.

[00:33:09] Ross Landles: Yeah, absolutely and still we have work to do together. Not just in the industry, but beyond trying to help people to understand. Okay, the explainability of my advice, one of the things that we saw in our research was around 50% of people had little or no understanding of where the health information within an AI tool had come from or how to kind of verify it, or how to think about it, how precise it might be, given what they’d prompted into it. And certainly, trying to think about those experiences and how to involve other sources, healthcare professionals and to make it more of an inclusive experience is going to be important, in our opinion, given what we’re seeing.

[00:33:05] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, very true.

[00:33:51] Ross Landles: Agency was super interesting for us when we did the research. Actually, one of the things that we were really surprised by was this kind of notion of reverse hypochondria. So, when people were using AI tools, they actually felt more confident, more confident to act. Whether that meant following the advice or just working with their healthcare professional, they just had more confidence. They felt less anxious about their disease and so it was an interesting area for us to explore. Sylvia, when you think about it, when patients arrive with AI-generated insights, how do you think about the care system? For example, the role of healthcare professionals. How do you think this is going to evolve?

[00:34:28] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Clinicians increasingly are becoming interpreters and validators rather than sole gatekeepers of information. It’s not a threat to their role. They are the experts. We need them. And it’s actually a more human one. AI can support both the patient and the provider simultaneously. But strong design is what determines whether the dynamic strengthens the provider relationship or undermines it, right? So, when it’s done well, the patient walks in more informed, the conversation goes deeper, faster, and the clinician, healthcare provider, spends less time on basic education and more time on the judgment call only they make. Recently, I went to go see a physician and it was very interesting because you know, of course, I use an AI tool to inform myself about my how I’m feeling, oh my god, what do I have, am I dying, or you know, do I just have a bug, what do I have. And my doctor actually he turned around and shared his monitor and goes, “Sylvia, you see this? I’m trying to look up what you’re experiencing” and he was able to go deeper to the point where he said, “Hey, I’m going to send you to the specialist.” So, it was a very different experience from both ends versus when I, you know, before this whole AI and data sharing, where it would have been like, “oh, I don’t feel good, doctor,” and the doctor was just telling me it’s just one direction, right? So, that’s how it was just kind of changing. I believe you know it’s going to help patients own more and get more informed and healthcare providers can really focus on where it makes more sense, more impactful, rather than basic education.

[00:36:27] Ross Landles: I think what’s interesting is we saw patients have embraced certainly this role, like as like help me find out about my health. Like help me understand this thing, help me go into the doctor with more understanding and a set of questions, a way that I’m thinking about the healthcare system, etc. And then on the flip side, doctors are often using these tools. We know there are specific platforms they’re using, and then of course they’re also making use of all the same tools that patients are. What’s interesting is both sides are very reluctant at the moment to embrace the kind of interconnect of those spaces. But I do think it’s going to be something that we need to think through as people designing for that system, for that space. Because at the moment, you know, we’re missing lots of opportunities because of our own natural human tendency not to want to, say, question the role of the healthcare professional. We also know that many healthcare professionals are also looking for clarity around what it means from a regulatory perspective, and of course, that’s something I think we’re going to see evolve over the next few years.

[00:37:26] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: AI can genuinely help patients ask better questions and better-informed patients tend to have more productive consultations with healthcare providers. But the agency without the guardrails becomes overconfidence and overconfidence in medical context can be dangerous. So, the design has to hold both things at once, building confidence, but the design in the friction points that redirects a patient back to the clinician healthcare provider at the right moments. I think that’s the key. That balance between the confidence and safety is one of the harder design problems in this space and it’s not a one-time fix, as we’ve been talking about before, is a journey, right? So, it has to be built into the experience journey continuously into the moment that matters.

[00:38:23] Ross Landles: When we did the research, we saw that among sort of pro users, 30% of those users had avoided going to see a doctor because AI had resolved their concern and I think trying to put some parameters around that and helping people to understand that in totality is going to be is something that we need to focus on in the next evolution of this set of tools, because again, those are those are those are big decisions and avoiding, again would not be the advice of an OpenAI or a kind of Anthropic or any of these tools that people are getting their advice from. So, something to think through and to try and help people get right.

The other dimension we looked at was pathways and here we see patients reshaping their care pathway and creating their own almost bespoke care pathway, if you like, creating their flow through the healthcare system. How do you think about that? And I guess within that, what do you think becomes the North Star for creating coherent experience as these pathways become distributed and if you like, atomized by patients and by the AI tools.

[00:39:28] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Relatively speaking, the North Star is simple to say and hard to execute, as we know. So, patient experience has to feel like one journey, not a handoff between multiple organizations, from doctors to doctors and to hospitals to the testing places to insurance to pharma, pharmacy that don’t talk to each other. Then it feels disjointed, fragmented. So, connected ecosystems are both technology challenge and an experience challenge. You can have the perfect data interoperability and still deliver a confusing experience if nobody designed for continuity, because it’s broken, right? The consistency and continuity become the metric that matters, not a single touchpoint in isolation.

[00:40:27] Ross Landles: I think the other kind of dimension to this for me is also then how do we think about data and data permissions. At the moment, we can have a very blunt way of thinking about data permissions, but we can imagine as we go through these more complex distributed care pathways that I’m providing lots of data as I go and some of that I’m confident to pass to, say, my healthcare professional, some of it I’m confident to pass to my LLM, some of that I’m confident to pass to my caregiver, some of it I may even be confident enough to pass to insurers where I need to get kind of insight and prior auth and starting to think about data more of a living object, much more atomized and actually giving really nuanced permission across my data is going to be vital to getting to that end-to-end flow that you say. So, it feels like one experience. We know there are multiple actors. We know that many people need to solve the care paradigm and I’m able to be really conscious about my data because, again, what we saw is that people don’t necessarily want their data going to say their employer or their insurer for obvious reasons, right? They think they’re going to get discriminated against, but they could see it going that way as in a controlled fashion, and as it’s going to create more of an outcome for them. So, I think moving beyond binary data is going to be really important.

[00:41:42] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, I totally agree because if you take a look at other industries such as banking. It’s your money. You have full visibility and access to every touchpoint, whatever your investment, banking or how you get paid and so on, right? But we’re not there yet with healthcare yet. So, you know, when we get there, I think that’s going to be, opening up for the next generation of healthcare experience. It’s hard to do. It’s very hard to do.

[00:42:14] Ross Landles: Maybe we can talk about that now. We’ve been talking through this conversation about what we’re seeing in the near future, right? Like AI as it is today, AI is shaping patient behavior today and also the importance and centrality of patient experience. But let’s look a little bit ahead. When you look through the vantage point that you have in your position at Sanofi, what do you see as the most significant shift that you’re tracking in the relationship between patients, technology, AI, healthcare systems.

[00:42:48] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, I think AI has become something closer to an always-on health companion, less of a tool, right? So, you open when something is wrong more of a continuous presence that shifts care from reactive to proactive and predictive. We can think about it from wearables that people wear to track their sleep, heart rate and all those. That shift only earns trust—which is super important—if three things hold together at once. First is a scientific rigor; second is ethical AI; and third is the genuinely great experience design. And if we miss any of these three, the whole thing will probably collapse, disjointed and fragmented. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets.

[00:43:45] Ross Landles: When we researched this, the idea of having an always-on AI patient companion that was guiding you, keeping and storing your data, supporting every decision, your companion across the care pathway. That future concept was extremely well received by people. What’s interesting is if we look five years ahead, we’ve always wondered, is there going to be a platform in play in digital health? And different teams have tried, teams from payers, teams from providers, and just because of the fragmentation of the overall system, they’ve not succeeded technology companies haven’t succeeded because it’s frankly too hard for them, right? They just don’t have the visibility of all the therapy areas, the conditions, how to manage patients through those. They’re just not well positioned to do that. Increasingly these tools look like they will be that platform and they will be that companion. And I think for us, it’s going to be about them providing much more the detailed evidence or the kind of the pathway that can support patients through the journey of managing their care using these tools.

[00:44:51] Sylvia Park-Ekecs: Yeah, interoperability is going to change and revolutionize.

[00:44:57] Elizabeth Wood: That’s our show. The Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Invent. Check today’s show notes for transcripts and more from our conversation.

We really want to thank our guests, Sylvia Park-Ekecs, Global Head of Digital Consumer Experience at Sanofi, and Ross Landles, Vice President and Global Head of Business Reinvention at frog.

We also want to thank you, dear listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends. Rate and review to help others find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global frog team at frog.co/designmind. That’s frog.co. Follow frog on X at @frogdesign and @frog_design on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at frog.co/contact. Thanks for listening. Now go make your mark.