Sam Garrison contributed to this article.
Human-Centered Design in Healthcare
Human-centered design, a creative problem-solving approach more commonly seen in product development than in healthcare, is changing how healthcare organizations engage with their patients and customers, and influencing how they tackle their biggest challenges. By applying the principles of human-centered design, organizations can more readily identify and address pain points for their patients, which allows them to develop innovations that directly improve the care of their patients and users.
In the Federal space, Deloitte has been working with our partners at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to use human-centered design to transform the insights and experiences of Veterans and their families into actionable improvements to VA care and services throughout the organization. Beyond VA, as part of the White House’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is partnering with the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows to redesign how patients and oncologists learn about and find information on cancer clinical trials. By applying the principles of human-centered design, patients and their care teams will have access to the information they need at the right time, as well as strengthen participation in cancer research studies to accelerate discoveries and treatments for cancer.
What is Human-Centered Design?
Human-centered design is a discipline in which the needs, behaviors, and experiences of an organization’s customers (or users) drive the product, service, or technology design process. It is a multi-disciplinary methodology that draws from the practices of ethnography, cognitive psychology, user experience design, service design, and design thinking. Human-centered design is not a single solution, but is intended to uncover the needs and desires of users. Think: increased transparency into when a patient’s prescription is ready for pick-up so she can better plan her day. Of course, this must be balanced with the constraints of technology, budget, timelines, and stakeholder interests. Human-centered design emphasizes the use of thick data over big data, looking at fewer users but diving more deeply into their needs, desires, motivations, and behaviors.
Human-centered design can be found everywhere. Apple has historically been a leader in applying human-centered design to their products. Recently, Apple announced during their annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference that the Apple Watch will support wheelchair users, allowing them to track their fitness goals. There are more than 2.2 million people who depend on and use wheelchairs every day, yet most wearable activity trackers do not have functionality that allow them to track their fitness. Apple spent time speaking with wheelchair users to develop algorithms and user interfaces that can better meet their needs, like adding functionality to the Apple Watch to remind wheelchair users to roll in place instead of sitting still every hour.
Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO and author of one of my summer reads, "Change by Design" articulated the value of using human-centered design 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 of business success.” Applied to healthcare, human-centered design puts the patients’ explicit and implicit needs and desires at the center of how health organizations provide care and services.
Human-Centered Design at the VA
The VA is currently working on using human-centered design to improve how the organization interacts with and delivers services to Veterans and their families. Two offices at VA are leading the charge to better understand their Veterans and innovate using human-centered design: the VA Center for Innovation, a group charged with building organizational capacity for innovation and driving operational breakthroughs in care and services, and the Veterans Experience Office, which is tasked with developing an understanding of the journeys that Veterans go through to receive VA services, and then sharing those experiences across the VA. By offering trainings for VA employees in human-centered design principles and launching a network of internal innovators, VA is empowering their employees to deliver better care to Veterans. VA is a great example of how human-centered design can help health organizations build new solutions and provide better services in even the most complicated areas of the healthcare journey.
The growth of human-centered design in healthcare has enormous potential. As the Internet of Things continues to grow and wearable technologies make tracking steps and counting calories easier than ever, designing healthcare services and experiences that make the most of these technologies will be essential. For example, wearable technology can be used to provide early health alerts to a patient’s provider or emergency services. Companies like Apple are already getting involved. Apple wants to encourage millions of iPhone owners to register as organ donors through an easy sign-up process from the native health app already installed on every iPhone. In explaining the new software, CEO Tim Cook highlighted his friend and former boss, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’, “excruciating” wait for a liver transplant in 2009. Other innovations focus on adapting and improving the physical environment of healthcare. Kaiser Permanente, for example, recognized that radiation therapy can be physically and psychologically grueling and often takes place in dim, cold basement facilities; they have infused spa-like touches for their new Radiation Oncology Center in Anaheim, California. These improvements not only help make patients feel comfortable, but also help improve patients’ medical outcomes.
Human-centered design is helping health organizations better respond to the experiences and needs of the individuals using their services, and as a result is driving innovations across the healthcare spectrum. Whether it is technological product enhancements or physical redesigns of healthcare facilities, the impacts of human-centered design in healthcare are only beginning to change how organizations meet patients where they are and provide them with the best services possible.