RESHAPE HEALTH GRANT WINNER
Onboarding patients to a healthier nutrition
Rewire Health champions the concept of “food as medicine”, confident in its potential to drive long-term health benefits and advance health equity. Their innovative app, Pursuit, is designed to cultivate the habit of preparing and enjoying healthy meals at home, providing users with personalized guidance and resources to support this vital daily practice. By integrating culinary medicine with technology, Pursuit helps users seamlessly incorporate healthier eating habits into their lifestyles. This approach is key to Rewire Health's mission of using nutritional knowledge as a foundational tool for improving wellness and reducing health disparities across communities.
Reshape Health Grant winners
The main reasons they won our Reshape Health Grant were the following:
Unique holistic Approach
Rewire Health has pioneered a multifaceted strategy by collaborating directly with healthcare professionals to harness nutrition as a therapeutic tool. They enhance their approach by engaging with community-based and health care organizations, creating a strong social dimension that addresses holistic health needs. Additionally, they've developed a sophisticated recipe framework algorithm, which personalizes meal preparation to accommodate diverse dietary needs and preferences, making healthy eating accessible and adaptable for all users.
Commitment to Health Equity
The team at Rewire Health is driven by a strong commitment to health equity, particularly inspired by addressing Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) such as food insecurity. Their work is motivated by the vision of a future where equitable health resources are available to all, helping to bridge gaps in nutrition and wellness in underserved communities. This commitment to tackling fundamental health disparities made them standout candidates for the grant.
Check Alvee’s case study to know more about SDOH and health equity.
It is all about creating the habit
From the very beginning of the discovery process, we understood that adopting healthy nutritional habits is much more than just providing recipes—it's about education and providing people with actionable, repeatable skills they can practice that lead to habit formation. The journey to habitual healthy home cooking begins with user engagement, which is significantly influenced by their initial interactions with the app. Therefore, the onboarding process is crucial. A well-crafted onboarding experience not only introduces users to essential features and functionalities of the Pursuit app but also motivates and empowers them to incorporate these tools into their daily routines. This is why we've positioned onboarding as our strategic focus, aiming to ensure it lays a strong foundation for long-lasting user engagement and effective habit formation.
The
Onboarding
The Pursuit app already had a functional user onboarding process and a substantial user base. Based on valuable feedback from existing users and professional dietitians, we quickly identified specific opportunities for improvement, especially in the sign-up and setup phases. This allowed us to focus our efforts on enhancing these critical initial interactions:
Sign-up and account creation: Setting email - password combo for future login and entering a unique code to link the patient with a health provider.
Setup: Asking for relevant information to customize the meals offering. Health risks and allergies are the key inputs.
Aha moment and value prop: Discovering a diverse selection of healthy meals, all tailored to their preferences and presented through a flexible recipe framework.
The
Signup
The initial onboarding screen, designed to expedite the process, required users to input their name, email, and password—entered twice for confirmation—along with an organization code. However, feedback indicated that users often struggled with the organization code, either forgetting what it was or misremembering the specific code provided by their physician. Our proposal: Split this into 2 parts:
By splitting the account creation flow into two distinct screens, the user's immediate focus is directed towards entering the organization code — a step we found to be challenging for some. This separation was strategically implemented after identifying that multiple users struggled with recalling or having the organization code on hand, an insight that surfaced repeatedly during our research interviews.
Initially, the Rewire Health team had reservations about incorporating social login due to privacy concerns and compatibility issues with iOS and Android stores. However, user validation sessions were key in shifting this perspective. These sessions demonstrated the clear advantages of social sign-up, boosting the team's confidence in this feature as a valuable addition to the app's onboarding process.
Account
Setup
In order to provide the full value, a set of questions are required to setup the account for the specific user. This includes health risks, allergies and dietary restrictions.
We streamlined the process by requesting only the essential information upfront. By featuring the most common allergies (based on recent U.S. healthcare data) we reduced the need for excessive scrolling. Additional details were strategically deferred to subsequent stages, ensuring a concise and less cumbersome initial experience for the users.
Fun fact 😄
In our user testing, many mistook eggs for a dairy product. This common mix-up, we found, could be influenced by eggs typically being stocked alongside dairy items in grocery stores, subtly shaping perceptions that they belong to the same category.
Aha moment: Learn by doing.
We have guided the user through the account creation, and asked the most relevant questions to customize the content. The challenge at this point was showing value right away, to keep the user enthusiastic and curious about what the app can offer. Why not show them how a meal is prepared?
Right away, a simple meal is presented highlighting the ingredients, serving sizes and appetizing full screen images. But this is not all, we made it mandatory to advance the tour by performing key actions to foster the feature discovery.
Ingredient swapping is a key feature that sets the Pursuit app apart from traditional meal preparation apps. Initially, this flexibility wasn’t obvious, leading to its underutilization. To improve this, we made it a central part of our interactive tutorial, allowing users to directly try out the ingredient swap feature. This hands-on approach not only makes the feature more visible but also helps users easily understand and use it effectively.
The
challenge
Implementing the tutorial introduced a significant technical challenge: adapting the recipe demonstrations to match the diverse dietary preferences entered during setup. This complexity required more logic to ensure that a vegan user, for example, would see completely different recipe options than someone with diabetes and a dairy allergy. Investing in this tailored approach is crucial as it aligns with our value-first strategy, enhancing user satisfaction by personalizing the experience to meet individual dietary needs effectively.
Exploration
Show me the content
After the guided tutorial, the final step in the onboarding was to showcase the app's array of offerings. We aimed to introduce users to a diverse and customizable selection of recipes without causing overwhelm. The welcome screen does this adeptly by categorizing meals, such as sandwiches or types of meals, providing structured pathways that improve discoverability. This hierarchical presentation of options ensures that users can see the variety available and find different entry points into the meal selection process, aligning with their unique preferences and dietary requirements.
Testing gamification
In order to pursue engagement and habit creation, we also tested the idea of challenging the user with a weekly plan of 3 meals. The idea was to present the first meal tutorial as the first of a series of “onboarding” meals that you can make in the first week. The concept of gamification was also in the backlog of Rewire health, and this came up many times during the discovery
After testing this with users, we realized that this was too much information to start the journey. The main goal was to experience how the recipe works, and adding the extra effort to think ahead was another task and commitment that is more suitable once they start making the first recipe.
While the three-meals challenge gamification concept was ultimately not included in the final version, its exploration serves as a testament to the collaborative spirit of co-creation that the design sprint fostered with the grantee. This dynamic allowed for a creative exchange where previously considered ideas could be tested in a supportive environment, backed by a team ready to manage the logistics, from participant scheduling to session facilitation and documentation.
Food as Medicine (FAM) is a holistic approach where food is viewed as a vital tool for medical intervention to prevent, manage, and treat diet-related diseases. This strategy can optimize the US healthcare system and has a huge role in advancing health equity by addressing food insecurity, a key Social Determinant of Health (SDOH).
Additionally, we recognized that food insecurity often manifests as "Food deserts"—areas where low-income populations have limited access to affordable and nutritious food, highlighting a critical area for intervention to improve community health outcomes.
Lastly, we discovered Culinary Medicine; culinary medicine fundamentally changes traditional approaches to nutrition by focusing on how to eat healthfully. Culinary medicine is a form of nutrition education that translates nutrition recommendations into feasible, repeatable food skills and behaviors through hands-on and experiential learning. Culinary medicine has been found to enhance behavior change, improve health outcomes, and be even more effective than nutrition education alone. Pursuit app serves as an excellent culinary medicine tool, allowing patients to continue practicing these skills at home, reinforcing good nutrition habits.
In summary, our grant project was dedicated to boosting health outcomes by fostering the habit of nutritious eating, with a special emphasis on engaging users. Here's what we accomplished
Simplified the account setup and signup process, streamlining user entry while maintaining necessary information capture for personalized experiences.
Created a learn-by-doing tutorial that allows users to learn the app's features by using them, demonstrating immediate practical value.
Developed a well-organized welcome screen that presents a broad array of options clearly, allowing for effortless discovery and engagement with the app's content.
Leveraged co-creation, integrating diverse stakeholder insights to refine the app's design and functionality, which underscored the collaborative approach as a driver of innovation.