Everyone’s health is his or her own. Everyone’s disease belongs to us all. Health is license; disease is liability…a very-personal liability that impacts humans as an individual, a family, a community, a society.
Now, 
Kai Worrell, CEO of his family’s eponymous firm, thinks that medicine has now become too physician-centric. As a human stance, corporate mission AND most-effective, long-term business strategy, Kai wants to put “patient needs first” —once again. This would be a canny drive to redress what Worrell sees as an unhealthy imbalance in power and perspective. CEO Worrell goes on to state, “Our focus is on improving the provision of care [to the individual] through empathy and technology.”
“Empathy” is not the typical watchword of hard-nosed business leaders. This is despite the fact that every client who signs a purchase order, or customer who pulls out a credit card, has made a personal or emotional decision to purchase something. That decision is mostly based on a relationship with the seller, the product or the expectation. The most certain basis of that relationship IS empathy.
Worrell Design invests scientific method and professional study in human relationships in its healthcare-marketplace environment. Consonant with its humanistic basis for its design and technology decisions, the company engages in high-caliber, field-grounded ethnographic research. To design effective, tech-driven people-solutions in healthcare, Worrell studies human groups in holistic response to the complex healthcare environments in question. E.g., patients in hospitals interacting with medical devices.
Kai’s leadership includes oversight of Worrell’s Ethnographic Research function — an innovation in operational design-management. Worrell researchers conduct user-studies in hospitals, clinics, and patient’s homes in developed and emerging markets around the world. From research proceeds, CEO Worrell also oversees the company’s continued efforts in offering the best device development processes, which now include the new 3D IM 3D-printed tooling and injection-molding capabilities.
As Kai Worrell says, “Our ethnographic methods are a hybrid between anthropology and investigative journalism.” By combining ethnographic research methods with a designer’s arsenal of ideation and visualization tools, Worrell “sheds light on unmet, often unspoken needs, translating these into strategic insights and opportunities. We call it ‘Pivotal Thinking’ — a 360º approach to exploring and extrapolating insights from all angles while staying grounded in the stated problem.”
Forward-looking Worrell is also “designing-in” innovations in other ancillary fields around its core medical-devices segment:
(1) Care Delivery: This includes the larger issues of successful, integrated patient Care Delivery driven by the medical-devices it designs.
(2) Systems & Services: To present effective, over-arching solutions, the company has assured its ethnographic research and design-strategy expertise applies as much to Systems and Services as it does to individual products.
(3) Wireless Health: Worrell is deeply engaged in Wireless Health via active participation in the wireless life-science industry; the firm is a sponsor of the seminal, eight-year-old “Body Computing Conference” at the University of Southern California.
(4) Wellness: Finally, Worrell advocates for proactive Wellness as the ultimate “cure” for disease. Treating illnesses is a reactive stance that wastes resources of every kind on a grand scale—not the least of which is the life-enjoying value of each individual’s natural good-health “resource.” The company is designing solutions to prevent illness and promote wellness, from functional foods to consumer technology.
For decades, practically the only patient-specific offering in the medical-device cabinet was the plaster cast. Now — in just the last few years — 3DP has begun to provide more and more solutions in the form of individual patient-tailored exo-devices and implantables.
Worrell Design’s new 3D IM — an innovation in 3D-printed injection molding —delivers health by (3DP) design. Its novel deliverables are small-batch prototyping and final-product runs of 10 to 200 units. Thus, Worrell is helping span the gap between patient-generic and patient-specific — through new solutions at the sweetspot of intersecting 3D printing and injection molding.
Worrell “3D IM” Infographic (created by Elena Ovaitt Weiss)
