26 May Why We Need Design Thinking In Healthcare
Designers begin by understanding how people work in the real world, and then create the best IT system that’s technically feasible.
The one given across all sectors of healthcare today is that change is coming, and not the gradual kind. This is multi-billion-dollar, build-up while tearing down kind of change. If that change is to lead to dramatic improvements in the effective and efficient care of patients, our systems must be redesigned, not re-engineered. Here’s why: It’s a matter of life and death.
On Sept. 25, 2014, Eric Duncan reported to the emergency department of the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas with a low-grade fever, abdominal pain, dizziness, and headaches. When he returned to the hospital on Sept. 30 and was diagnosed with Ebola, the question asked by nearly everyone paying attention (and we all were) was, “How could the doctors and nurses have missed the telltale signs of Ebola presenting in a man just returned from west Africa?”
The hospital’s first response was to blame a design flaw in its electronic health record (EHR) system that prevented travel history data entered by nurses from presenting itself to doctors. It later retracted that claim, stating, “There was no flaw in the EHR in the way the physician and nursing portions interacted related to this event.” The system behaved exactly as it was intended to.
So was there a flaw? Absolutely. The system was built with the assumption that the people using it should conform the way they work to the way the EHR was built, rather than the other way around. In other words, like most healthcare systems, their EHR was engineered.
Design, on the other hand, begins by gaining an understanding of how a system is likely to be used within a given environment and creating that system accordingly.
For those on the delivery side of healthcare, it is not news that very few of our systems are created with consideration of how they’ll actually be used.
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