Target participants
Patients living in rural areas who recently traveled for medical diagnostics, and local primary care doctors or pharmacists who refer them.
The problem
Rural patients in India frequently spend whole days and significant money traveling to district headquarters just to get basic blood tests or scans done. They lose daily wages, face unreliable local transport, and often repeat trips because prescriptions or lab slips were filled out incorrectly the first time.
Health clinics in small towns lack diagnostic infrastructure, and existing referral systems rely on informal word of mouth. Designers need to understand how families weigh the cost of travel against the risk of delayed diagnosis, mapping out every friction point from the initial village clinic visit to final sample collection and report pickup.
Research question
How do rural patients decide when a health issue is serious enough to warrant a costly travel day for tests, and what information gaps cause them to make wasted trips?