Brushing your teeth twice a day and visiting the dentist twice a year may seem routine to you, but for many low-income families in the United States, receiving dental care is confusing, impractical or costly. In addition, many communities lack accessible care and consider a trip to the dentist as emergency treatment, rather then a preventative measure. So, even when patients come in for treatment, it doesn’t mean they’ll come back. In the communities hellosmile serves in New York City, on average, only twenty percent of patients return for regular-check-ups.

In order to tackle America’s single most common chronic childhood disease that is not only preventable but also curable, we need to change how we care by providing low-cost and effective preventive health care solutions. In order to accomplish this, we at hellosmile are focused on creating customer services that not only incentivize tooth decay prevention, but also promote wellness for the entire body.

hellosmile was conceived of in response to a growing need for easy access, low-cost, and effective preventive health care for low-income communities in New York City. We are an organization of healthcare workers, business leaders and multidisciplinary designers dedicated to eradicating oral disease by developing services and experiences that build comfort, awareness and participation between caregiver and care provider.

Our business practice depends on service design thinking to work through complex problems and develop innovative, user-centered solutions that focus on engaging families; empowering change-makers and connecting the communities we serve. We believe service design thinking can break barriers in healthcare that have otherwise been ignored by the design and management community, or considered too ‘wicked’ to be approached with innovative strategies. We will share with you a few examples of our service designs, including THE PASSPORT, our customer incentive program, and helloLEARN our staff professional development program.

We will also speak about helloLAB, our internal innovation lab that is used by our business managers, internal design team and health care staff. The lab is a hub where people work, meetand share data, ideas and sketches openly and collaboratively. The lab also extends into the clinics where new ideas can be tested, prototyped, implemented and observed. We apply many tools and techniques of service design thinking to help facilitate more constructive, user-focused conversations between our team members and this helps us figure out how to make our ideas happen. Service design helps us turn our spreadsheets into sketches, efficient systems and inspiring experiences and eventually back into spreadsheets as we gather more data, evidence and experience. In this talk, we will provide sage advice and share what we have learned along the way (and how we are applying that forward) and how we think more people can apply the same strategies and design processes within their own communities.