HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Design for Care fuses design practice, systems thinking, and practical healthcare research to help designers create innovative and effective responses to emerging and unforeseen problems. It covers design practices and methods for innovation in patient-centered healthcare services.

Design for Care offers best and next practices, and industrial-strength methods from practicing designers and design researchers in the field. Case studies illustrate current health design projects from leading firms, services, and institutions. Design methods and their applications illustrate how design makes a difference in healthcare today. My hope is that you will adapt the lessons, methods, and insights in this book to a product, organization, or service system in your own work.

Who Should Read This Book?

Design for Care was written for three audiences: designers and design researchers in healthcare fields; healthcare professionals and clinical practice leaders; and service, product, and innovation managers in companies serving healthcare.

Healthcare is complex, and learning even one vertical slice of a vast field is a significant undertaking. Learning and working across a second sector is a career challenge. Working effectively across sectors is unheard of. Designers, researchers, and practitioners across all three audiences typically work within a single sector—for a hospital, an information technology (IT) company, a medical products company, or a service provider. This book aims to inform design professionals across sectors (and design disciplines) and to contribute to their ability to design for the continuous life cycle of patient-centered service experiences. To ensure quality and manage costs across the whole system, a holistic view of healthcare and design is necessary.

For service designers, product, and innovation managers, I cover the most compelling information and service opportunities in healthcare with case studies and informed research. There are few guides for product managers in healthcare. Although this book does not specifically focus on product and project management, it weaves together many missing pieces overlooked in product and service innovation.

Most care providers work in one sector as well, deeply focused in a practice and an organization. This book helps inform clinical leaders of innovation methods, and encourages their understanding of the value of design thinking in health services, informatics, and organizational practice. Effective and ethical system design is not just making things work better for end users. Design leadership requires a collaboration at the practice level to contribute organizationally and systemically. I introduce health leaders to design and systems thinking approaches to help them innovate patient-centered service.

With the increased focus on improving the user experience in health websites and services, many designers new to the healthcare field will be learning about these users while on the job. Design for Care explores cases and methods for bettering human experience on both sides of the care experience, for both the patient and the care providers. It speaks to both new and experienced practitioners, and should be especially useful for those in transition between fields. For healthcare providers and those already managing projects “inside the system,” adaptation of successful methods and patterns is encouraged between different cases and uses.

What’s in This Book?

Part I: Rethinking Care and Its Consumers

The three chapters in Part I focus on the healthcare consumer. Chapter 1: Design as Caregiving presents a perspective on design as a way to provide care and addresses the problem of the fragmentation of design practice and engagement across the different healthcare sectors. Chapter 2: Co-creating Care focuses on design for health information seeking as a way of co-creating value in immediate care situations. Chapter 3: Seeking Health examines personal health decision making.

Part II: Rethinking Patients

The two chapters in Part II make the transition from health seeker in a consumer context to a patient-oriented perspective. Chapter 4: Design for Patient Agency presents agency and connectivity as alternative design factors to balance the traditional healthcare default perspective of patiency, which often treats patients as passive participants in their own care process. Chapter 5: Patient-Centered Service Design presents a systems approach to service design, and attempts to resolve differing concepts found across health service approaches. Human-centered approaches to service design focus on the primacy of patient experience, improving the touchpoints of care along the continuum of service responsibility.

Part III: Rethinking Care Systems

The four chapters in Part III look at care-centered service design in the complex systems of clinical healthcare and information-based work practices. Chapter 6: Design at the Point of Care is a service design approach to clinical decision making, medical education, and the four stages of clinical service design. The focus on medical education connects physician training, clinical work, and the care organization as designable services in a whole system. Chapter 7: Designing Healthy Information Technology looks at health IT as both innovation and system infrastructure at both the enterprise and practice levels. Lessons learned from electronic medical records and meaningful use provide a context for designing improved IT in clinical practice. Chapter 8: Systemic Design for Healthcare Innovation develops a systems thinking approach to designing service and organizational innovation in healthcare. Chapter 9: Designing Healthcare Futures presents methods and models for reimagining healthcare service from near- and long-term future perspectives, to enable strategic and socially responsive innovation.

What Comes with This Book?

You’ll find additional content in this book’s companion websites (http://designforcare.com and www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/design-for-care/). Its diagrams and other illustrations are available under a Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/.