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.
Challenges Involve:
Difficulty coordinating medical records and history across two healthcare systems
Cultural practices and beliefs often overlooked by Western providers
Unstructured follow-ups with family and doctors 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 that bridges the gap between the two healthcare systems immigrants navigate.
Key Features:
Involve trusted family and experts from back home in health decisions
Centralize conversations and records for easy, secure access
Support cross-border care through translation and shared experiences
Research
"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.
Users view healthcare holistically, prioritizing mental health, wellness, and self-care as part of a preventative approach.
2. Healthcare is collaborative.
Family deeply influences users' health decisions, with providers back home often acting like extended family. After immigration, community networks also become vital support systems.
3. Healthcare ties to home.
Users often continue relying on care from back home due to trust, cultural familiarity, and affordability, turning to the U.S. system only when necessary, and navigating both systems long after immigration.
4. Culture shapes healthcare & wellness.
Cultural factors like language, diet, and social context shape users' care experiences but are often overlooked abroad, prompting them to seek culturally aligned or familiar providers back home.
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 Research helped define the intervention
Research revealed that South Asian immigrants often navigate between two healthcare systems long after immigration, facing challenges in coordination, communication, and cultural continuity.
The intervention's goal is to help users maintain familiar, culturally rooted care practices from back home by enabling collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and informed healthcare decision across borders.
“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
Co-creating with the user
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
While AI can help address user challenges, expert human support remains essential for building trust.
AI can offer objective information, but expert guidance remains the primary source of support for users.
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.
Enabling cross-country collaboration with trusted individuals helping the user preserve familiar cultural context in their healthcare experience.
How it Shaped the Intervention:
What the users said:
Fostering a sense of community by creating a space for users to learn from and share knowledge with fellow immigrants.
Shared knowledge from other students and professionals who immigrated from India to the U.S. significantly influence user healthcare decisions.
The Design process
Low Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity Prototype
Outcome
Digital Product
Service Design Proposition
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.
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
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.