Despite tremendous advances in healthcare technologies and facilities, the ways in which care is provided and received today remains narrow and reactive.
However, adding design voices to innovation initiatives can be a powerful tool in expanding, evolving, and improving how care is given by healthcare professionals and received by individual patients and the collective population.
Noah Waxman discusses healthcare’s most extensive care and patient experience issues and the power of design and innovation to help solve them in novel ways that benefit providers and patients.
Q1. What are some of the biggest issues impacting how healthcare is delivered and received today?
I’m thinking about three major issues in particular.
First, despite tremendous advances in healthcare technologies, the ways in which care is provided and received today remains narrow and reactive, with patients seeking care only when once something is wrong, typically in response to sickness or injury.
However digital technologies – when designed well from the ground up – can be powerful tools in expanding, innovating and improving the ways in which care is given by healthcare professionals, and received by both individual patients and the collective population. This expansion beyond reactive treatment does pose new experiential and operational challenges across facilities, digital ecosystems, and human-power services.
Second, most innovative treatments are currently designed for the elite few, not the many. For decades, medical innovation has followed a top-down approach where cutting-edge treatments and technologies are born in elite institutions and slowly trickle down to the population at large. While this model has driven significant advancements, it’s also left vast segments of society underserved and overlooked.
And third, I’m thinking about the massive opportunity in front of larger health systems who have been out-innovated by startups. These health startups are attracting significant venture capital interest by addressing niche needs and integrating patient experience considerations with clinical care in the most innovative ways. Large health systems are falling short when it comes to innovation but – with their more established infrastructure, resources, trust and relationships – have huge potential to lead health innovation and reach a much larger patient base.
Q2. What role do design and innovation play in addressing these challenges?
We have seen time and time again that the processes and methods designers use in “innovation consulting” projects have tremendous power to identify opportunities for improvement and solve for some of the most complex problems across industries, including healthcare.
Design can help healthcare organizations large and small take a more proactive approach towards patient care.
Cactus has designed an entryway into new hospital rooms that allows doctors, nurses and patient guests to get contextual information based on who they are and their role. For the care team, this can mean greater efficiency and easier access to personal information about the patient. We worked with another hospital system to redesign the system’s entire approach to constructing new, and renovating old, oncology infusion centers. The project allows the time to completion to shrink and the end-user patient experience to dramatically improve.
Another example is Cityblock Health, spun out of Google’s innovation group Sidewalk Labs in 2017 to provide care to marginalized, low-income and elderly populations with a focus on outcomes. As a value-based care organization, Cityblock can increase profitability by keeping their patient population healthier and reducing hospitalization, allowing them to invest in multidisciplinary teams, be available 24/7, care for patients in their homes, and focus on the main causes of medical issues. It is essentially design in practice.
Design can also effectively direct innovation budgets and resources towards focusing on low-access populations. When healthcare designers focus on low-access populations (instead of those with the most means) they face the most challenging and tightest constraints, forcing them to think creatively, strip away unnecessary complexity and zero in on the most fundamental aspects of care delivery. The founder of home goods brand OXO originally designed kitchen utensils for his wife who was suffering from arthritis, but he soon discovered the tools were easier to wield by anyone. At Cactus, we call this bottom-up approach, trickle-up innovation.
Design can also help larger health systems leverage their unique strengths while adopting startup-like agility. Design can help them tap cross-disciplinary expertise, which can be used to create integrated, consumer-friendly interfaces that streamline the patient experience across various specialties.
Cactus worked with Mount Sinai to create Lab100, a new clinic experience aimed at collecting data and biomarkers for the Mount Sinai research team. Together, we developed 10 gamified testing stations with interfaces that guide visitors through each activity, an innovative method for conducting clinical research and offering care and a great example of how design can help large health systems merge the digital novelties of a startup with the foundation of a large institution.
Q3: How and when does engaging a designer have the most impact?
In short, as early as possible. The biggest mistake we see healthcare organizations make is silo-ing design thinkers into projects only once “the brief” is done and dusted – once a budget is allocated, an internal team is established and an RFP is written.
This works when a solution is already perfectly understood by the organization, such as when it is agreed that a new digital tool is needed to do a specific job, or when a facility renovation is needed to achieve a certain specific goal. These types of projects are great, but they simply do not allow for maximum impact of the type of creative, outside-the-box, human-centered thinking that designers are trained to deliver.
For maximum impact, design must be brought in much earlier in the innovation process, ideally in the planning, research and strategy phases and have a seat at the leadership table.
These are the conversations about what to do, how to do it best and why. Not just the moments to execute an already-baked plan.
Doing so ensures an innovation mindset from the start, opening wider doors for technology, digital experiences, new models of care and new service lines. When designers obsess over the patient or user experience, we can open up medicine to be proactive, preventative and predictive. We can open up the current narrow reactive medicine and design along the entire spectrum of health and wellbeing
Designers are often considered important only for the patient experience, but when brought in at the start of an innovation project, they can help shape so much more.
Q4. What positive business outcomes can hospital systems expect from investing more in innovation?
Investing more in innovation, and bringing designers into the process early, can bring significant benefits for both patient and provider.
An investment in innovation can force healthcare startups and large systems alike to ask themselves the right questions that aim to improve how care is given. Questions like, how can digital products extend care journeys across time and cut across medical disciplines and silos; how can digital tools better prime patients to receive information about themselves; or how can the physical design of facilities shape quality of care & patient experience and support greater doctor/patient relationships.
On the provider side, innovation investment can help make doctors and other medical professionals better “storytellers” of patient health, leading to more educated and empowered patients. Improved design of physical facilities can better serve doctors, nurses, & staff and help prioritize wellbeing amidst the rampant fatigue and burnout long plaguing healthcare providers.
The Mayo Clinic, for example, partnered with Ambient Clinical Analytics to develop and implement a real-time clinical decision-support system called AWARE (Ambient Warning and Response Evaluation), which helps reduce cognitive overload and burnout among healthcare providers by streamlining data presentation and improving the efficiency of workflows.
Design and innovation within healthcare can drastically improve the quality of care provided to patients and wellbeing of providers within a healthcare system that too often loses sight of these core priorities.
Noah Waxman, an entrepreneur, brand strategist and award-winning designer who partners with healthcare visionaries around the globe to design and build the health and wellness companies of tomorrow from the ground up. As the CEO and co-founder of the strategy & design firm Cactus, Noah has spearheaded design thinking for global health brands including Advent Health, Mount Sinai, Canyon Ranch, Mayo Clinic and Blue Zones to create innovative experiences that benefit both provider and patient.
The Editorial Team at Healthcare Business Today is made up of skilled healthcare writers and experts, led by our managing editor, Daniel Casciato, who has over 25 years of experience in healthcare writing. Since 1998, we have produced compelling and informative content for numerous publications, establishing ourselves as a trusted resource for health and wellness information. We offer readers access to fresh health, medicine, science, and technology developments and the latest in patient news, emphasizing how these developments affect our lives.
