Design Thinking: Much Needed Thought Process in the Healthcare Industry

What is Design Thinking?

Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO, defined Design Thinking as “A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” In other words, one’s ability to think like a designer can bring tremendous improvement in the customer experience by fulfilling the deep-seated desires of the customers.

Design Thinking is a five-step process and here’s the brief explanation of each of these steps:

1. Empathize: Prepare a relevant questionnaire to gather crucial information. Understand the end-users’ expectations, needs, feelings, and more importantly the pain points.

2. Define: Put all the answers you collected in the “Empathize” step in front of you. Reflect on the conversations you had earlier in the “empathize” step. Finally, come up with a point of view which represents everyone’s views.

3. Ideate: Brainstorm and come up with as many plausible solutions as possible. Zero down on the most plausible solution and pass it on to team members for the next step.

4. Prototype: The aim of this step is NOT to make a final product. Quickly make the prototype with the bare-minimum features which address the pain points of the users and pass it on to early-users for testing.

5. Test: Collect feedback from all the users and catalog them. Analyze the feedback and make a decision whether to proceed to make a final product or to go back start all over again.

Design Thinking in Healthcare Industry

Many healthcare industries have had a quite traditional approach when it comes to running the business and creating products. According to Marie Hartmann, Design Director and Partner at Designit, “The user experience is often just a by-product of the service provider’s organizational structure and processes.” Introducing the concept of Design Thinking is extremely challenging, but much-needed, task.

Times are changing and so are the needs and demands of the users. With that, the approach is changing too. Application of the Design Thinking concept to the healthcare industry would, certainly, enhance innovation, quality, and the impact of the product by focusing more on the patients’ needs.

Here are Some Design Thinking Success Stories in the Healthcare Industry:

1. Thomas Jefferson University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Montreal — Design Thinking Success Stories at University Hospitals
2. UCSF & IDEO — Applying Design Thinking to Schizophrenia Care
3. Stanford Healthcare — Design Thinking to Improve Patient Experience

My Story

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I am an innovative, result-oriented Research Scientist with 10+ years in the field of In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD), and a Service Design enthusiast. A few months ago, I stumbled across an article about Service Design and Design Thinking. The more I read about it the more interested I became. All of a sudden, I began to see how are surrounded by services all around and how terrible they are. It felt like the world needs to be Service Designed.

After my tryst with the concept of Service Design, I enrolled myself in an MBA in Service Design program and recently, I started working for a company, Inme Health, which is focused on developing tools for monitoring stress hormones. Currently, I am applying the Service Design and Design Thinking principles for improving the services provided by Inme Health. And I hope more companies in the healthcare industry apply Design Thinking for service and product development.