For Women By Women

General Electric approached Sub Rosa with an unexpected challenge: faced with declining market share in medical imaging, the company needed a new approach to their business that would create a catalyst for change within the marketplace, and help GE rise to a new position as innovator and market leader. In order to accomplish this, Sub Rosa was tasked with reimagining the mammography process and leveraging key insights to help chart a course for GE's future in medical imaging.

Led by conversations and research that focused on patients, cancer survivors and medical professionals, Sub Rosa developed a strategy centered on patient empathy. Historically, patient experience has been relegated to a minor or entirely absent part of the medical imaging journey. Innovation in the machines or technology wouldn’t move GE's business in the right direction quickly enough (on average, technical innovations take eight years to pass approvals and perform at scale). Instead, Sub Rosa focused on understanding the soft science and experiences that, informed by patient conversation, could be improved. By reversing the point of view and focusing on the patient versus the hardware, Sub Rosa discovered new points of empathy that revealed underlying pain points in the experience and built a program designed to solve these issues.

In order to truly understand the patient experience, Sub Rosa designed and opened a retail space in New York's SoHo district. The space invited women of all ages and demographics to share their experiences, and work collaboratively with researchers and engineers to understand how to improve the overall patient experience. Findings ranged from issues of pain and comfort management, lexicon and taxonomy improvements, to overall spatial efficiencies, design improvements and more. A concept exam room took findings from the conversations and manifested them in real time for testing with participants.

The results of this experience exceeded expectations on every metric. Not only was the program successful in developing a path to new financial and market share growth for GE's medical imaging business, it was also able to unearth a variety of findings that improved the overall patient experience, efficacy of testing, and national screening rates for women.

On the business-side, Sub Rosa developed a service layer to GE's product business, allowing the findings from the research to be monetized by GE with its core hospital customers. Instead of simply selling machines, GE added a consulting layer that allowed the business to help hospitals develop GE Women's Centers that took into consideration findings such as lighting, lexicon, temperature, patient comfort, and other key experience drivers. This new revenue stream helped the brand capture additional market share and revenue that was otherwise undiscovered.

On the patient side, this program discovered new modalities to screening and the overall patient experience that increased the propensity for regular patient scheduling of screening, testing efficacy, and ongoing follow-up and patient care. Overall, this program gave GE a viable platform that allowed the business not only to grow in financial terms, but to build a new high-water mark for the industry in terms of patient understanding and empathy.