Co-Care
Care in India is easy to enter and hard to continue
A rare condition
doesn't happen to
one person.
It happens to the family.
~70M
Indians live with a rare disease
ORDI estimate, via ORF 2023
According to WHO,
50% of chronic
care patients struggle
to follow their
treatment plans
especially in
developing nations.
Gap 1
Lack of Information
Unclear next step/treatment plan
3%
remembered everything they needed to manage at home
1 in 4
fully understood their own condition and care plan
Gap 2
Lack of Infrastructure
Faster care means private hospitals
1 : 834
remembered everything they needed to manage at home
~10 mins
fully understood their own care plan and condition
Gap 3
Lack of Emotional Support
Patients carry fear and exhaustion
~40%
of people with chronic illness live with depression
~85%
with depression or anxiety get no treatment
How patients with rare chronic condition navigate care in India
Recovery needs more than medical care. Understanding the condition, planning around daily life, finding the right help, tracking what works and coping emotionally all fall outside treatment, and largely outside the system. I set out to test where support was missing, framing the research around five dimensions of rehabilitation drawn from literature and case studies.
Hypothesis
If patients and caregivers get the right tools, knowledge and guidance at the points where spirals start, they can manage rehabilitation more independently and rely less on repeated hospital visits.
Navigation post-treatment
Key support during transition
How do patients and informal caregivers navigate the Indian healthcare system post-treatment, and what gaps or challenges do they encounter in accessing necessary resources and information?
What are the key support needs of rare chronic patients and their informal caregivers during the transition from treatment to rehabilitation and long-term care management?
Identifying the Dimensions of Rehabilitation
Before speaking to patients and caregivers, I defined five dimensions of rehabilitation from the literature. They structured the market study, the interviews and the co-design workshops.
1.
Sense-making and education
Understanding the condition, the rehabilitation phase and what to do next.
2.
Care planning and goal setting
A plan shaped around the person's health, finances, family and culture, not a one-size-fits-all protocol.
3.
Resource and system access
Knowing which expert, service or resource to turn to, and being able to reach it. In a system without referrals or coordination, finding the right help is itself a task.
4.
Monitoring and Feedback
Tracking symptoms, triggers and progress to see what works and what doesn't.
5.
Emotional and psychological support
Room to deal with fear, anxiety and isolation, for patients and caregivers alike.
Learning from tools outside rehabilitation
Before looking at care apps, I studied how people are supported through hard decisions, difficult emotions and lasting behaviour change, in healthcare and beyond.
Identifying the Dimensions of Rehabilitation
Before speaking to patients and caregivers, I defined five dimensions of rehabilitation from the literature. They structured the market study, the interviews and the co-design workshops.
Decision making
A physical, structured prompt makes a
difficult conversation easier to start
Chronic care involves heavy decisions made under uncertainty, often shared between patient and family.
Emotion tracking
Emotion trackers make feelings easier to name,
but designed only for one person
Emotional strain is as much a part of chronic care as symptoms, but harder to record.
Health and care management
Care apps are good at tracking, but none is
built for the months after discharge
I reviewed chronic care apps used globally and in India. Some focus on a function, or a condition or general wellbeing.
Comparative analysis against 5 Dimensions
Ratings are based on a review of each app's features and published information.
Monitoring is well covered. Everything the spiral depends on is not: understanding the condition, planning around real life, finding the right help and coping emotionally. Access to resources and the health system is missing across all five. And none of them includes the caregiver.
Patients and caregivers aren't short of effort. They're short of structure.
Participants tracked symptoms in notebooks, tried different diets and remedies, and asked friends and online forums for advice. These efforts were not connected to each other or to their doctors. When symptoms returned, they had no plan to fall back on and often started again from the beginning.
Understanding the life after diagnosis
I spoke with patients, caregivers and care professionals across India through interviews, a co-design workshop and a survey. Every method looked at the same four areas of life after treatment.
Unheard
Emotions
Patients and caregivers cope
Trial-Error care management
Managing care in holistic aspect
Unconfident Information
Knowing what to do next and whom to trust
Fragmented
support systems
Finding the right care systems
Structured Interview
The trouble often
starts long before
discharge
I traced each condition from first symptoms through diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation.
Journey Mapping Interview
A metaphor made the
hardest months easier
to talk about
Participants mapped their experience as a sea journey.
Card sorting activity
How families worked
out themselves after
treatment
Participants sorted cards describing care activities into categories.
Survey form
A mixed-methods survey combining rating scales, multiple choice and open-ended questions.
After a short concept video, with a 10-minute survey. It asked about their own experience: how they prepared for doctor visits, and how they set and tracked goals during recovery. The rest section asked for feedback on two card decks, one for visit preparation and one for self-care goals.
Journey Map
By the time rehabilitation begins, families are already exhausted
I combined the patterns from every patient and caregiver story into one composite journey, across awareness, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation. Mapped together, the stories showed that families enter rehabilitation already tired, distrustful of the system, and relying on support they have built themselves.
The starred moments mark where the system fails them most, where the lack of structure spills over from health into work, relationships and emotional wellbeing. These moments became the six opportunity areas for design.
Three loops that keep families stuck
The six moments where the system fails most don't happen in isolation. They feed each other. Grouped by how they reinforce one another, they form three loops, all running on the same root cause: nothing structured is in place after discharge.
The Information Blindspot Loop
Without starting point,
searching makes it
worse
The Emotional Suppression Loop
Setbacks are carried
quietly, and the whole
family feels it
The Confidence-Relapse Loop
Not knowing triggers
turns every symptom
into a crisis
Three questions to design for
By the time rehabilitation begins, families are already exhausted
How might we
provide the patients
and caregivers with
vocabulary that can
help them structure
their confusions
How might we
design an integrated
service for navigation
and guidance support
from emerging roles in
care
How might we
reduce the trial & error
approach and provide
the right structures to
identify the triggers
causing relapse
What the research set up
These three questions became the brief for the design phase. What followed was Co-Care: a service that connects patients and caregivers with verified care coaches, built and tested with the same people who shaped the research.
See how Co-Care was designed
Design direction
Bridging the transition with Care
Research into how patients with rare chronic conditions and their caregivers manage life after hospital discharge in India
Role
Product Designer
Team
Design Director
Development Team
Business Team
Tools
Figma
Sketch
Confluence
Jira
Timeline
2023 - 4 weeks
Full Time
Project
MA Service Design thesis
Supervised by
Prof. Jan-Christoph Zoels and Dr. Andrew Polaine
Role
Service Designer
Timeline
Jan-Sep 2025
OVERVIEW
As a patient, you leave the hospital with a diagnosis but no plan for what comes next. Recovery becomes trial and error: new doctors, new tests, advice from forums and friends, each paid for out of pocket.
As a caregiver, you become the coordinator, researcher and emotional support, often while working and running a household. The system doesn't see you, and no one asks how you're coping.
As a healthcare system, India offers fast access to specialists but little continuity. No one is responsible for the handover from hospital to home, and rare conditions fall outside most support programmes.
This research looked at that gap.
I defined five dimensions of rehabilitation from literature and case studies, studied how tools outside healthcare support hard decisions and emotional tracking, and compared existing care apps against the dimensions. Interviews, a co-design workshop and a survey with patients, caregivers and professionals revealed three loops that keep families stuck, and pointed to an emerging role that could help break them: the care coach. These findings set the direction for the service designed in the next phase.
Bridging the transition with Care
Research into how patients with rare chronic conditions and their caregivers manage life after hospital discharge in India
Role
UX Researcher
Product -
Service Designer
Team
Design Director
Development Team
Business Team
Tools
Figma
Sketch
Confluence
Jira
Timeline
2023 - 4 weeks
Full Time
Project
MA Service Design thesis
Supervised by
Prof. Jan-Christoph Zoels and Dr. Andrew Polaine
Role
Service Designer
Timeline
Jan-Sep 2025
OVERVIEW
As a patient, you leave the hospital with a diagnosis but no plan for what comes next. Recovery becomes trial and error: new doctors, new tests, advice from forums and friends, each paid for out of pocket.
As a caregiver, you become the coordinator, researcher and emotional support, often while working and running a household. The system doesn't see you, and no one asks how you're coping.
As a healthcare system, India offers fast access to specialists but little continuity. No one is responsible for the handover from hospital to home, and rare conditions fall outside most support programmes.
This research looked at that gap.
I defined five dimensions of rehabilitation from literature and case studies, studied how tools outside healthcare support hard decisions and emotional tracking, and compared existing care apps against the dimensions. Interviews, a co-design workshop and a survey with patients, caregivers and professionals revealed three loops that keep families stuck, and pointed to an emerging role that could help break them: the care coach. These findings set the direction for the service designed in the next phase.