Developing a sustainable revenue model for a hospital foundation

UNSW x Accenture Song

The Problem

The Royal Hospital For Women Foundation received most of its funding through a mix of government grants and donations. When it came to supporting all their research and growth endeavours this wasn’t enough, and so they required the development of an additional revenue stream that would be sustainable and feasible with their limited resources.

My Contributions

I led a team of 3 other design students to develop a revenue-generating solution for the Royal Hospital For Women Foundation. I researched the problem and ideated solutions along with the team. In addition, my role involved delegating tasks amongst the team, aligning the team with the project timeline, facilitating conversations with the client, and the UX/UI design of the chosen solution.

Background

The Royal Hospital for Women’s Foundation was providing essential funding for medical equipment, research studies, and other innovative programs at NSW’s only dedicated women’s health hospital. The Foundation relied heavily on a small group of loyal benefactors, which limited its funding potential and so they saw a need for maximising funding through developing a strategic revenue model. The Foundation approached UNSW to use this design problem as the basis for a student innovation exercise in collaboration with Fjord (now Accenture Song).

Framing the problem

The design process began with familiarising ourselves with the client and problem space. During this stage we identified the main internal constraints faced by the client in developing an alternative funding solution:

1. Limited resources to start and maintain the developed solution
2. Maintaining patient confidentiality.
3. Be able to deliver a quick financial return and have a long term and ongoing impact.

Through stakeholder and target audience mapping exercises, along with discussions with the client, we identified three key challenges the Foundation faced in relying on donations as its primary source of revenue:

1. Low incentive to donate beyond good will.
2. Public misconceptions around amount of government funding.
3. Donations largely limited to local geographic catchment.

Based on our research and findings, we established that for the solution to be successful, it would need to have:

  • Personalised experiences that resonated with potential users / audiences.

  • A consistent narrative around funding and the reason for it.

  • Reach a wide range of users / audiences.

Stakeholders

Hospital Target Audiences

Design Response

After thorough research, ideation, and iteration sessions exploring various products and services to meet the foundation’s needs, we decided to develop a subscription-based online learning centre. The Royal Hospital for Women Foundation already had a free online education platform; however, it was extremely limited, featuring only three articles and a few videos.

Our concept aimed to expand this platform by developing a wide range of content in collaboration with UNSW Medicine – a partnership already established with the hospital. The goal was to create a comprehensive resource dedicated to supporting individuals and families through various life stages and their associated health and wellbeing challenges. Leveraging the hospital’s reputation as a trusted source of healthcare information, the platform would offer valuable content to the public, making it a resource worth paying for. The subscription model meant users had flexibility in engaging with the content and it would be modelled similarly to other personal interest learning platforms which 35% of Australians aged 15-74 participated in. Through our research we found that the subscription model meant that users were more likely to try our platform and that healthcare practitioners and institutions were their preferred source of health information despite having issues around convenience and access. Our solution responded to these factors and offered the foundation a sustainable and robust revenue source that took advantage of their pre-exisiting partnerships and resources.

In essence, the online learning centre is the companion to the first aid kit, and is a digital support kit for life’s big and small moments. It can support hospital goers, their families, and beyond through sharing health information from a source more trusted than many other platforms available online.