The Drug Pricing Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is a national leader in advancing rational approaches to drug pricing and health insurance—sustaining innovation while increasing health equity by ensuring access and affordability. The Lab asked Constructive to help strengthen their brand and create a website that bridges the esoteric, wonky world of pharmaceutical pricing. Central to success was educating a diversity of audiences on the issues to increase understanding, help shape policy, and make healthcare more affordable and equitable. Together, we redefined the Drug Pricing Lab’s brand and created a focused, feature-rich website that has helped them influence policy and generate concrete action.
We began by engaging stakeholders to gain the perspective of the Lab’s leadership, and then conducted sector research to better understand the key issues and peer organizations working on them. With a solid understanding of the ecosystem in which the Drug Pricing Lab operates, we led a collaborative, integrated strategy process that defined the core pillars of the brand and a user experience that clearly communicates its mission, advances its work, and engages audiences in the effort. Our digital strategy combined a human-centered content strategy with the “Jobs to be Done” theory to create a website that meets the specific needs of industry experts, policymakers, the media, and more. We then articulated the vision for the future with a 4 Foundations Framework detailing the brand, content, design, and technology priorities for the Drug Pricing Lab’s new branding and website.
A top priority for the Drug Pricing Lab was making its research and recommendations more accessible to a broader audience. Designing the digital experiences that would make that possible started by creating a new logo and identity design system that invited audiences in while still emphasizing the rational, common-sense approach to their work. And while the Drug Pricing Lab is an independent nonprofit, it was important that there still be some connection to the Memorial Sloan Kettering brand to which it belonged. Leaning on Memorial Sloan Kettering’s trademark blue as our foundation, we created an iconic logo and design system of illustrations that are bright, inviting, and streamlined. The result presents the Drug Pricing Lab as a distinct and innovative brand in its space, making its work more accessible and supporting the objective, informative research that’s central to its mission.
The Drug Pricing Lab’s website has three primary areas of focus. First, it explains the complex issues that drive the pricing of pharmaceutical drugs. Second, it makes the Lab’s wealth of research and case studies available to people interested in the work that the Lab is doing to address those issues. And third, it empowers people with sophisticated interactive tools and data visualizations that can help them in their own work. We collaborated with the Lab’s team to create an integrated content strategy and information architecture that provides clear pathways to engage with content, organizes everything so that it’s easy to find, and creates content relationships that encourage deeper exploration. Special emphasis was placed on ensuring that content was accessible to a broader audience by applying best practices in content-heavy web design. And on the interactive tools front, we led dedicated prototyping workshops to translate complex ideas and data into accessible information.
Like many research institutes and policy-oriented nonprofits, the Lab’s communications are extremely content-rich and must reinforce expertise and credibility. There’s an academic quality to their work, and honoring that is essential in the designed experiences they create for audiences online. At the same time, for the Drug Pricing Lab to achieve the impact it seeks, it must engage key audiences, such as policymakers who are not as interested in research intricacies. The Lab’s new website extends the pillars of their brand to be both scientifically grounded and people-centered, creating a bright brand experience that focuses on content clarity—delivering key takeaways alongside legible, long-form text, with inviting illustrations that make complex concepts accessible.
The policy and market pricing issues surrounding the pricing of healthcare and drugs in America are as complex as they are confusing. They’re also incredibly difficult to wrestle with when it comes to reforming the system to increase health equity and make healthcare more accessible and affordable for patients. The Drug Pricing Lab helps demystify it all by providing a deep dive into the four key issues that are the primary drivers of unaffordable healthcare in America—and that drive the Drug Pricing Lab’s work. We designed and engineered a flexible publishing system that gives the Lab’s team a cohesive system of components to flexibly publish pages that engage audiences with different combinations of content, key statistics, and data visualizations.
Along with its wealth of research content that educates audiences, the Drug Pricing Lab website offers a suite of interactive tools that engage and empower people to explore the issues through various lenses. A combination of data-driven interactive visualizations filled with proprietary research and expository tutorials deepens understanding and appreciation of the complex dynamics of drug and healthcare pricing—at the same time that they instantly make clear how complex and intertwined the issues are.
Conflicts of interest related to pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology companies are extremely common and have the potential to influence both costs and patient care significantly. To help the Drug Pricing Lab lay out exactly how this complicated network of industry influences works, we created an interactive tool, the Conflicts of Interest Map—informally and aptly called “The Octopus” because of the significant tentacles that demonstrate the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and players that participate in how drugs are researched, manufactured, regulated, and delivered. It’s an evidence-based map—and an appropriately tangled mess—that exposes all known ties, financial and non-financial, between the medical product industry and the healthcare ecosystem.
How do drugs go from being invented and approved to being made available to patients? Depends on whether we’re talking about the physical journey of the drug or the financial one. Oh, and also, it’s different for drugs that are dispensed through a pharmacy and those that are administered directly by clinicians. At every step of the way, different stakeholders exert varying degrees of influence on the outcomes. Simple, right? To demystify these complex journeys, we created interactive drug pricing tutorials that tell the story and make it accessible to both expert and novice audiences.
One of the most innovative research tools of The Drug Pricing Lab is their “Drug Abacus,” which takes data on 52 cancer drugs and maps them against key data points. We built a novel interactive tool that empowers audiences to either start with the Drug Pricing Lab’s three pricing dynamic presets to get a quick overview or dive in and modify the different drivers that contribute to the price of drugs using advanced filters and controls. As a result, the Drug Abacus both highlights what the Lab’s experts think matters most and empowers audiences to bring their own assumptions and preferences to explore complex drug pricing dynamics.
“The Drug Pricing Lab works in a very complex area of the healthcare industry. Constructive did a great job getting to really know us, how we view our organization, and the issues we work on so that our brand would be effective in delivering the right message. Their team is very research-driven and methodical, just like we are, which made for a great fit. And they were both patient and open to new ideas—all of which resulted in a brand and website that do a fantastic job accomplishing our goals.”
Peter B. Bach, MD—Director, Center for Health Policy & Outcomes, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
