Our Design Institute for Health is a collaboration between Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and was envisioned by our inaugural Dell Med Dean. In addition to health design work for the associated clinics and for the community, we've created a distinction track for third year med students focused on the role of design in health. The design distinction is built around a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and solving for the needs of people in the health care system, including patients, providers, administrators, etc. Our students will ultimately develop prototypes for these needs through collaborative partnerships with community health organizations.

Do you have any data regarding the effectiveness of your program? This would be very interesting from a medical education scholarship point of view. As I double majored in Art History and Biology, I am extremely interested in the intersection between the arts and sciences and transdisciplinary collaborative approaches.

We don't yet have data on this because we've just begun! Dell Med at UT Austin is a new med school, and so the inaugural class of med students will begin their third year classes later this year. They will be the first to experience our distinction track in health design. Another panelist, Bon Ku, is the Asst Dean for health and design at Jefferson's medical school, where they've been teaching design to med students for a couple years, I believe.

Hi Sona, that is a great question! And one that I only somewhat recently really grasped the answer to, when someone asked me the key to why I am really successful as a physician. It’s because I treat each patient like a design problem. If you were to come to see me, with your twin sister, with identical problems/symptoms or diagnosis even - it’s still important for me to understand you and solve your individual problem, and to craft a solution that uniquely fits your needs or hers. At it’s heart that is what I believe design is all about.
When I teach workshops to clinicians on Design Thinking - this is what I stress. It doesn’t matter that then never want to invent something new, or even redesign their office - it is still a relevant and very useful tool.

Design+Health at Alpert Medical School is a student-led collaboration between our medical school and the RI School of Design (RISD)! It started in 2013 when some enterprising medical students at Brown decided to team up with design students from the world-class design school, RISD. I've been lucky enough to have been one of the student course leaders who have continued this interdisciplinary, cross-institutional, educational collaboration.

Over the course of an academic semester, pre-clinical medical students and undergrad/grad design students team up to work through the design process and create solutions for healthcare challenges. From the student perspective, we've received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both design and medical students who have been able to learn much from each others' perspectives. Medical students learn how to study spaces/devices/processes from a design perspective and prototype their ideas while design students gain one-of-a-kind access to real problems and users in clinical settings.

While we haven't specifically integrated the One Health Initiative, one of the goals for our course has been to teach design in a broad sense. That's meant applying design thinking towards health systems change and using end user perspectives to inform how we can reform health care.

We're currently working to expand Design+Health from a one-semester course to a 4-year longitudinal scholarly concentration at Brown.

Would be happy to talk more, you could also check out Design+Health's website here: designplushealth.org/

Similar to the question as to where design thinking can be applied, there are a number of areas (problems large and small) in which design thinking can be impactful. For optimal impact to merit not only the time and resources but to also gain sufficient buy-in, the area should be "local" meaning of relevance to that particular healthcare organization. "Sticky wickets" or "wicked problems" to that organization are good places to start.

In the end, these are also likely common concerns to any healthcare organization (e.g., addressing the opioid crisis while managing pain, reconciling concern for fatigue versus volume of handoffs, etc.).

Great question. Access to care often requires systems design in addition to service design, as it typically involves numerous organizations in a community and different incentives that need to be understood, aligned upon and communicated. We've had a key payer partner from the beginning, who serves the under and uninsured, and whom we hope to work alongside more on designing better access by addressing social determinants of health, such as transportation (and therefore reducing ED overutilization). Resistance to change in health care is prevalent and is hard, but a great way to overcome this is by understanding and involving key stakeholders from the beginning. Consider stakeholders to be some of your key users. Conduct in-context interviews, have them participate in user research in some way, co-create and prototype with them, etc. It will be a longer, but ultimately, much more effective process.

There are a number of challenging problems to reconcile where design thinking could be helpful whether it is reconciling the need for privacy/preservation of dignity and mitigating falls risk or suicide risk; reconciling the need for documentation and delivering efficient, empathic, patient-centered/patient-activated care; facilitating handoffs across a continuum, to name a few.

Additionally, enhancing patient experiences within the ED, oncology, labor and delivery, etc. are ripe environments and circumstances.

In addition to Erin's good points about security, patient experience, and data sharing, I'd like to add the design thinking benefits of minimizing workflow disruption and of enhancing the overall user experience (usefulness and usability) with using health IT tools.

I think it's important for EVERYONE to create solutions from a design thinking mindset. I even teach clinicians that they should approach their patients as a design problem.

Forget all the buzz word nonsense. Plain and simply put - DT is simply REALLY understanding the problem (from as many different angles as possible), shedding preconceived notions of what will work - and coming up with all the possible (even impossible) solutions, and thoughtfully testing out ideas with the least possible investment of time and resources - and incorporating that learning back into the solution.

Can you see any reason why you wouldn't approach life that way? (let alone Healthcare Innovations). I would argue, it would be a good way to even plan a bank robbery - not that I am suggesting you should do that.

Have any of the panelists employed design "sprints" to tackle an issue in a short period of time? Joey, perhaps?

medium.com/project-management-...

I have participated in Design Sprints, and they can be a great way to make quick progress on a challenge. In order to work, they require the right people (team of key stakeholders and an experienced designer / facilitator) and dedicated time for the duration of the sprint (typically a week). For more info, check out Google Venture's Sprint book site, which includes a 90 second video overview of the process. thesprintbook.com/

The short answer is that we all make time for the things that we enjoy. If we can demonstrate that it is a truly fun and empowering process, we will make time for it. If not during the clinical day then on weekends, evenings, etc. Everytime I have taught clinicians my Design Thinking for Healthcare workshop - they have left raving about how much fun they had, and how much they learned. One recent participant, a very senior physician, said it was the best course he attended, and another said it was "life-changing", and a third said it "filled [him] with hope!" This isn't meant to be a shameless plug for my course - just a point that there is a way to do it that works. I teach them how I use it daily in clinical practice, as a vital clinical tool to design solutions for my patients. So then they can begin to exercise the skill and build that muscle.
"If you build it, [they] will come!" caveat: you have to build it right!

The longer answer is it needs to be a systemic change. The system at large needs to recognize the importance of the process, and create time. Unfortunately, our time as physicians is structured really poorly - which leads to the rampant clinician burnout and fatigue.

@Patrick Diamond - Short answer. Yes and No!

Longer answer - when I was the Med Director of a large substance abuse program for the VA that covered Cali, Hawaii and parts of Nevada - I used the design process to rapidly develop ideas about how to better meet our patient's needs. The no is that I didn't use the exact Google methodology.

Andrew is correct. Design Thinking is more of a mindset than a process. Make sure you spend most of the time using empathy and discovering your patients, employees, and shareholder needs. Then make sure your ideas are broken into quick deliverables. Each deliverable is a prototype. And don't fall into the trap of thinking of creating an entire project plan of sprints - accomplish something and then keep moving.

Use the Crack model. Give it away until they're hooked. And then recoup your investment. Then when they like it - ask them if they would recommend it to a friend(s) - and then give it to them.

For an idea to go viral, it needs to pass the critical threshold of the adoption curve. Roughly 12-15 percent need to start using it before it becomes mainstream and widely adopted. Otherwise, it is just a fad. In healthcare, with such a risk-averse population, we circumvent early adopters with clinical trials - which provide the same expert/vetted testimony that early adopters would in other industries.

One question I would have is - why exclusively to healthcare? wouldn't it be good for everyone? In which case, get backing, find the celebrity endorsement - and that will push it virally! Read Tipping Point - it may be applicable.