About Momentum

Experience design bridges the gap between innovation and impact.

Our health experiences stay with us, and they shape what we do next. Momentum exists to make those experiences count so your solutions succeed in the real-world.

Helen Balcombe, founder of Momentum Health Experience

The founder

Hi, I'm Helen.

From my first days working in healthcare communications back in 2007 until now, the area I've found most exciting and motivating has always been experience design.

Whether it was the total privilege of spending time with patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals to really understand what they're going through, or the creativity that came with designing how to improve it, I always knew that if I ever took the massive leap to start an agency of my own, this is where it would be.

Ultimately, I think it's our experiences that really matter. They shape our memories, leave their mark, and sit at the core of who we are. Health is just no different.

Our health experiences stay with us. I remember to this day my terrible BCG injection experience, I have the scar and the fear to prove it. I'll also never forget the kindness and care my family experienced at an end-of-life hospice a few years back. Everything from the bed placement, so there was a view of the field and animals outside, to the food, to the communication and the care team. Just a couple of examples, but these experiences will be with me forever.

Almost more important than the memory our experiences leave is the impact they have on what we believe and do in the future. How we view our own health. How we approach the healthcare system. How we engage with treatment. How we adopt new technologies. The list goes on.

If we want meaningful, positive results from the amazing innovations we're developing in health, we have to ensure the experience we create around them stacks up. You can have the best solution out there, but if people are too scared to show up for the appointment, too overwhelmed to take the medicine, too frustrated by the process, or just not sure it takes priority in their lives, it simply won't succeed.

The idea

Why can't it be about all of it?

And yet so often we still work in silos. We start with the healthcare solution. We look at clinical development and education. We talk about brand and customer experience, or system and service design, or product and software, or behaviour change and patient engagement. We commission each discipline at different moments, all of it fab, all the problems valid, but more often than not working independently of one another.

I kept thinking: why can't it be about all of it? Who's looking at the whole? I absolutely get there's specific craft in each discipline, and I'd never want to lose that. But I couldn't see why we couldn't put those experts together to think holistically.

So this is me, and this is what Momentum is all about.

In one line

Momentum brings together a diverse set of experts, focuses them on a specific challenge, and considers every angle, so together we create health experiences that have a lasting impact.

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