Healthcare Design Thinking and Improvement to Patient Experiences
Healthcare Design Thinking and Improvement to Patient Experiences
The Harvard Business Review recently spoke to a hospital administrator about a reoccurring problem that patients tend to experience –– missing their medical appointments. In this article, Harvard Business Review discusses design thinking, how it was used to improve this issue, and how to apply it to the overall patient experience.
Key Takeaways from the Article about Healthcare Design Thinking
- “Each year approximately 2.6 million people miss or put off medical appointments due to transportation issues, leading to annual costs for health care providers in the billions of dollars.”
- “One of the most promising approaches for understanding patients’ experiences has been design thinking, a creative, human-centered problem-solving approach that leverages empathy, collective idea generation, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing to tackle complex challenges. Unlike traditional approaches to problem solving, design thinkers take great efforts to understand patients and their experiences before coming up with solutions.”
- “Hospitals versed in design thinking would identify this general challenge and then assign a team or task force (ideally a multidisciplinary one) to spend weeks or even a few months studying the patients it affects.”
- “Design thinking can be used to address challenges in a variety of domains related to the patient experience…An approach that starts with investigating the patients’ perspectives, including their greatest pain points, may give administrators ideas for how to make the [experience] more bearable.”
If you would like to view the full article, visit: https://hbr.org/2017/08/health-care-providers-can-use-design-thinking-to-improve-patient-experiences
CTI offers trainings related to the healthcare design process. If interested, contact us.
