CollabCare: Collaborative Healthcare for South Asian Immigrants in the U.S.
Timeline
September 2024 - May 2025
Capabilities
User Experience, User Interface, User Research
Team (Full-stack designer)
Ayushi Shah
South Asian immigrants in the United States are often in between two healthcare systems, often even years after immigration, leading to challenges involving:
Coordinating and communicating medical reports, medical history, etc. between two distinct healthcare systems
Cultural factors such as family remedies, practices, and beliefs about healthcare being left out or misunderstood by Western healthcare systems
Inconsistent, unstructured and informal follow ups with trusted family members and healthcare providers back home
The project is a part of my Master's Thesis and is an investigation on how immigrant South Asian women adapt to the healthcare services after immigration to the US.
Overview
The problem statement I identified
The proposed solution
A collaborative mobile app designed to bridge the gap between the two healthcare systems immigrants navigate. It empowers users to include trusted family members and healthcare/wellness experts from back home in their health/wellness-related decisions and structure the conversation from afar.
Key Features:
Connect users with trusted experts and care practices from back home
Centralize all health and wellness conversations and records in one place for easy access, privacy, and better understanding across borders
Bridge cross-border care through translations, shared immigrant experiences, and collaboration with trusted members back home
The outcome is a Figma prototype of the mobile application and a working website of the translation AI bot.
Research
The research was guided by the questions: "How do immigrant South Asian women adapt their healthcare practices after immigration?What cultural factors shape their healthcare experiences?"
Research Insights
1. Healthcare & Wellness Intersect.
The user's approach to healthcare extends beyond clinical care, encompassing mental health, wellness, and self-care practices that support a more preventative approach to overall health. This is further motivated by the
2. Healthcare is collaborative.
Family plays a central role in the user’s healthcare journey, guiding health and lifestyle decisions, and even staying involved during clinical visits. Providers back home often act like extended family, staying connected through informal communication. After immigration, community networks also become key sources of support.
3. Healthcare ties to home.
Many users continue to rely on healthcare practices, remedies, and providers from back home, even years after immigrating. This is a conscious choice driven by trust, cultural familiarity, and the affordability of care in their home country. They turn to the U.S. system only when necessary, living in between two healthcare systems after immigration.
4. Culture shapes healthcare & wellness.
Cultural factors such as language, diet, risk perception, and social context deeply shape the user's healthcare experience. These are often overlooked in the services the user receives abroad, motivating them to seek culturally aligned providers or continue care with trusted providers back home who understand their values and lived context.
Who is the user?
1. User surveys
2. Culture probe kits
3. User interviews
4. Expert Interviews
5. Literature review.
South Asian
No chronic illness
21 - 35 years old
Female
From India to the U.S. (1–7 years ago)
Professional/Student (has health insurance)
Origin
Health Status
Age Group
Gender
Immigration History
Profession
What were the Research methods used?
The Expected user journey versus the Realistic user journey map
The Realistic user journey is found to consist of several additional steps, mainly involving family and trusted healthcare providers from back home
Defining the Problem Statement
South Asian immigrants in the United States are often in between two healthcare systems, often even years after immigration. This leads to challenges in coordinating and communicating between two distinct healthcare systems, which often leads to difficulties in accessing essential healthcare services, and retaining practices from back home.
“Back home there are many practices like Ayurveda, homeopathy that I used to follow because I got that from my parents. We just don't rush to antibiotics and taking strong medicines altogether.”
“I have to then explain to an American doctor that Paracetamol or Tylenol doesn't work for me, I need Crocin. But I guess an Indian doctor would know what Crocin is.”
“Imagine connecting your Indian health insurance to the one here, so I don't have to pay extra if I already have one in India, that is just kept there, waiting.”
- Target users
Defining the design intervention
Based on the problem statement, the goal of the intervention was to bridge the gap between the two healthcare systems, and allow the user to retain the healthcare and wellness practices that feel closer to home.
At this stage, aligning the design intervention with user needs was essential. To do this, I conducted a co-creation workshop with five users to help define the intervention.
Screenshots of the co-create workshop activities to define the design intervention (L to R)
Activity 1: Mapping challenges and key touchpoints across the user's care journey
Activity 2: Brainstorming solutions to user challenges and exploring their potential impact
Activity 3: Evaluating solutions and discussing user comfort with each option
What the users said:
While AI can help address user challenges, expert human support remains essential for building trust.
Shared knowledge from other students and professionals who immigrated from India to the U.S. significantly influence user healthcare decisions.
A hesitation to cut out the role of trusted healthcare providers and family members from back home, accompanied by skepticism toward U.S. healthcare providers' willingness to understand cultural contexts.
How it Shaped the Intervention:
AI can offer objective information, but expert guidance remains the primary source of support for users.
Fostering a sense of community by creating a space for users to learn from and share knowledge with fellow immigrants.
Enabling cross-country collaboration with trusted individuals helping the user preserve familiar cultural context in their healthcare experience.
The proposed design intervention is a mobile application that facilitates collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and informed healthcare decisions with trusted individuals across geographies.
The Design process - Product Features & User flow
Feature 1: Threads
Feature 2: Resources
Feature 3: AI Health Bot
Outcome
Product Features
Feature 1: Threads is the core feature of the app that supports structured, collaborative conversations on health and wellness, across geographies. Users can ask a key question, add context, and invite trusted collaborators to share input. The interfaces provide AI feedback to allow for translation between medical terms and medication across geographies to make collaboration easier.
Stakeholder opportunities:
User: Follow familiar healthcare and wellness practices while abroad, get easy access to experts from home for trusted feedback
Family: Support their loved ones from afar with their healthcare and wellness journey
Healthcare provider(s) in India: Enable providers to offer paid, structured support and maintain long-term relationships with loyal patients who continue seeking care when visiting India
Local businesses: A chance to gain loyalty from South Asian customers
Community Members: A sense of support and access to endorsed resources
Healthcare Provider(s) in the US (next step): Understand the needs of their immigrant patients better, so as to gain their trust and sustain long-term care relationships
Feature 2: Resources lets users access and share trusted, culturally relevant health information within the South Asian immigrant community. It supports care across geographies while staying connected to familiar practices and advice.
Feature 3: Healthbot helps users and their collaborators bridge communication gaps by providing translations and definitions of medical terms across geographies.
The goal of this project was to create not only an application, but a cross-border system designed to support immigrants, their healthcare providers, and families back home. The result is a service design proposition built around the application that serves as a medium of communication and collaboration, to create value across stakeholders.
Product Demo
Service Design Proposition
Reflections
Learnings
The project was a valuable opportunity to refine my user interface design skills and practice designing an end-to-end mobile application of Figma.
The project taught me to work in a complex industry, such as healthcare, and learn the necessary terminologies and systems in parallel to the design process.
Lastly, throughout the process, I learned to take peer and user feedback, and guidance from Engineers and other experts, towards building a complete product
Next steps
Given the time frame of this project, I identified a couple of next steps to work on given I pursue this project further:
While users expressed comfort sharing information, privacy concerns should be further explored.
Given the app handles sensitive health data, compliance with standards like HIPAA must be considered, especially in the context of healthcare providers in the US.
The current focus is on South Asian immigrant women and hormonal health, but it can expand to other users and conditions.
Integrating with tools like WhatsApp or Apple Health could support familiar workflows while enhancing care decisions.
Multilingual support could improve accessibility across different geographies.
Further exploring the role of AI in enhancing collaboration
Most importantly, I am currently working on developing the application with the help of AI tools to get further feedback from users and experts.