How Design Thinking can work in Healthcare

Introducing design thinking in a regulated industry

(NEC Corporation of America with Creative Commons license)

Healthcare is complex, complicated, emotional, rewarding, and most of the time, challenging. There are innumerable problems to be solved. As a User Experience Designer, working in Healthcare allows me to research, prototype, and present improvements in cognitive overload and cut down documentation time for care teams to have a better experience around their patients and vice versa. The unique aspect of designing in Healthcare is that you are in a heavily regulated industry and that being compliant is always the priority and experience takes a back seat (understandably so). However, by embracing a design thinking mentality/culture, a company/product can achieve both.

When we are working on healthcare products, there are three things to balance — the needs of the business, the needs of the user, and the needs of regulation. It influences so many of the decisions healthcare professionals make, playing a role in everything from how they record and store data to prescribing or capturing a treatment. Some of the biggest challenges with designing in Healthcare is building for an audience that sometimes has very different expectations, incentives, and a heightened sense of liability. These challenges drive behaviors and the risk aversion in the field. HIPAA violations are a significant fear in the hospital/clinical setting and for a good reason. Keeping all patient health information (PHI) stored securely on a digital device is a unique challenge to design, and while the bulk of the pressure falls on secure development and security, HIPAA compliance also extends to design teams, informing how we manage interactions that deal with PHI. We have to be conscious of what uncertainties medical professionals may have, and what legal, compliance, policies, and procedures may have in store for us.

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Where do we start?

When I started in Healthcare, it was a whole new world for me, and I wanted to take it on. I quickly learned that there are areas in Healthcare that are not as simple as designing a checkout experience for a commerce site or viewing financial data tables. Great things happen when a team comes together to identify and embrace a genuine problem and then build a solution based on the expertise of every individual on the team. When I say team, I mean an individual or two from the UX Research/Design team, Architecture team, QA team, Dev team, Business team, Legal team, and if attainable, creating a SME’s (subject matter expert’s) team that are close to the nurses or physicians to add light to both the problems and the solutions.

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Most importantly, involve the stakeholders in the design process early in the project. Having the stakeholders early on in the process help create co-ownership of the product so that you have backup to make changes based on research findings. Have a one-on-one conversation with a stakeholder and ask them questions around the problem. If there are multiple stakeholders, schedule an hour or two with each individual, and capture any similarities or differences around the issue. Consolidate your findings and conduct business readouts involving the stakeholders as this may help get everyone aligned with the problem and possibly build a solution. Be engaged in the business requirements meetings to gain a better level of understanding where the business needs are coming from; that way, you can see the holistic picture of the goal. Do not take on a healthcare (or any) project alone; lean on your shared pool of knowledge to create the appropriate experience for the care team.

Nielson Norman has a great article on How to Collaborate with Stakeholders in UX Research.

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Now that we have everyone in the room, what’s next?

Apply design thinking to your exercise. Start by defining the problem you are trying to solve for and ask questions to the broader team around technical constraints, dev efforts, and the levels of complexity. Asking questions and having stakeholders in the room help build an understanding of what is feasible from a technical and regulatory perspective. Spend time fully understanding the needs of the business team, end-users, and regulations. Once you have an understanding of who and what will be involved with the product, start ideating a solution. You have a room full of knowledge and expertise; use it to build a long list of things to try. By doing so, you will feel more comfortable experimenting, gaining insights, and presenting your findings to the team later on. The idea is to learn as much as possible and test often.

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Remember, we are advocates for our care teams. We build the experience around them and not the other way around. Getting everyone in the room allows everyone to hear the what’s and why’s to a problem, and we as designers provide the solutions to those concerns. Spend time in the hospitals, stay for a shift or two, and capture everything that is going on around you. This is where you learn an incredible amount of information about how the experience is going to shape the design of the product.