Navigating our health system is far from easy. But just imagine you’re a young adult who’s just finished high school, moved to a new country and English is not your first language.
That’s what it is like for international students who have chosen Australia as their place for tertiary study.
Understanding their perspective would be impossible without engaging them. So when we embarked on the project of building an app for international students, they were our first port of call.
Our relationship with universities enabled us to recruit students for focus groups and gain their insights into what they need to understand how the Australian health system works.
Even the things that most Australians would intuitively know, such as how to call ‘000’ for Emergency, that hay fever causes a runny nose and itchy skin, that a Doctor is referred to as a GP, is not something that all of the students were aware of.
Development of our overseas health cover app was a true human centred design process, where the insights we gained from students formed the basis of the design.
What we thought was important at the beginning of the process was not where we landed.
The students were the catalyst for providing links to Beyond Blue and 1800RESPECT which has showcased our Medibank healthcare capabilities.
They helped us change our assumptions and create an app that was ‘for them’ in the true sense of the word.
So far we've had more than 1000 downloads of the app with the Find A Provider, Health Advice and Symptom Checker features proving most popular.
The benefits of putting the customer at the centre, speak for themselves. So watch this space - there’s more to come.
You can download the Medibank Overseas Health Cover app here.