Grand Studio August 23, 2023

Designing Products for Healthcare: 5 Important Considerations

In the healthcare space, the design choices you make can quite literally have life-or-death stakes. Getting it right is important.

But healthcare environments are unique spaces, and what works in other industries might not always carry over. In addition to regulatory considerations like HIPAA, many healthcare organizations have distinct cultures and ways of doing things shaped by decades of caring for people, often in extreme circumstances.

Grand Studio has had the privilege of working with several healthcare organizations over the years and has come away with some rules of the road when it comes to product design in these specialized spaces. Read on for five key things to keep in mind.

Tip #1: Involve Clinicians & Other Stakeholders from Day 1

For the best chance of success, bring in key stakeholders right from the outset — particularly clinicians. For one, their perspectives will be critical to developing whatever you’re creating. But also their involvement will also help build buy-in and trust.

Too often, clinical teams get burned by the debut of some new technology that was clearly built without insight into their day-to-day experience and ends up causing more headaches than it eases. Looping these key stakeholders in immediately and keeping them up to date as the design process moves forward will have a two-pronged benefit: you’ll spot potential problems in the design, and you’ll also do a lot to socialize your effort. You build faith that you’re listening to them, working to understand their unique, high-pressure world.

That said, keep in mind that they are busy literally saving lives. They may not be available for every collaboration you’d want from them, so as part of your Day 1 involvement, settle on a cadence that gets your team the input you need while respecting their often busy schedules.

Tip #2: Onboarding Must Be a Part of Your Design

Take the time up-front to consider the onboarding process. People working in healthcare environments, from doctors to nurses to administrators, almost always have a great deal on their plates, and what’s on their plates is extremely important. Changing a process or asking people to adopt a new product can feel extremely disruptive. Even something people may ultimately find helpful and time-saving might gather proverbial dust if the channels of a routine run too deep — especially if it’s not explicitly clear why or how people should switch things up.

The single most important thing you can do to help onboarding is getting an internal champion — someone who believes in what you are doing and can support you in socializing it from within. Clinicians tend to place a high degree of trust in insiders who know through experience what their day-to-day life is actually like. Finding the key leverage points in the culture of an organization and getting them on your side will be critical to any onboarding/socialization plan. (In our experience, the most powerful shifters of culture are doctors and nurses.)

And of course, onboarding is not a one-and-done thing. Just as the design requires iteration, so too does onboarding. It’s important to continually go back to the front lines and tweak how the value prop and plan are described, paying attention to what yields the best adoption.

Tip #3: Design for Rapid Action

Healthcare providers frequently need to do things quickly. While efficiency is valuable in any situation, there are particularly time-sensitive moments in healthcare — like responding to a patient with a critical condition exacerbation.

In a recent project with one of the largest private healthcare organizations in the US, our task was designing tools for nurses to remotely monitor patients with postpartum hypertension. In our design, we asked ourselves how we could enable nurses to quickly identify which patients required their attention most urgently — digital triage, in essence. If a patient in a life-threatening condition was identified, we also asked ourselves how we could best support the subsequent action that needed to be taken. For patients with dangerously high blood pressure, we worked with our client on a system by which nurses could immediately alert not just the attending physician but also the patient and their circle of care. Nurses could act rapidly on the situation and also keep everyone connected.

Tip #4: Allow for Personalization

In the clinical field, there is a vast diversity in job functions as well as people’s way of doing things. Instead of making a one-size-fits-all solution, you’re better off locating and enabling key points of personalization that allow people to do their jobs in ways that suit their needs.

We recommend interviewing wide sets of end users and attuning yourself to the subtle differences in process that could inform how you allow for personalization of the product. Some clinicians, for example, only need to view a subset of the patient population in order to do their job, and anything beyond that will be visual clutter. Some clinicians need to filter down by a particular biometric or health status marker. Some clinicians need to respond to issues in different ways than others. Building in personalization helps you meet people where they are and let them practice medicine the way they know best.

Tip #5: Support the Patient-Provider Relationship

The job of technology in healthcare should always be one of making healthcare providers more efficient and effective — not impinging upon or trying to replace a clinician’s relationship with their patients. No matter how “intelligent,” technology is ill-suited to replace this powerful and healing relationship.

Focus instead on getting technology to solve lower-level problems so that providers can spend time on patients in need of their skill set. Focus on designing tools that enable high-impact interactions and offload low-level ones. Figure out ways to optimize and clear a path for what care providers do best.

Want to learn how Grand Studio can help with your next healthcare project and build clarity out of complexity?

Drop us a line! We’d love to hear from you.

Anna Lathrop June 27, 2023

How to Innovate for Long-Term Vision

Many of us have been in a position where, amid our day-to-day tactical work, there surfaces a nagging suspicion that some long-term organizational vision is needed. You know something major needs to change, that some kind of high-level ethos-tinkering could push your team forward… but nobody quite knows what that thing is.

Even if you manage to set up a brainstorming session to get some fresh ideas out, what often happens is that a few wild ideas will be thrown out, then immediately nixed due to (very real) feasibility or viability concerns. How does anyone get past these blockers to arrive at exciting — yet grounded — innovation?

What does a successful visioning process look like?

This is a common problem we tackle frequently at Grand Studio. While every project will have constraints to take into account, successful visioning typically boils down to 3 main things:

Allow time to think expansively
Keep your ideation separate from your editing
Choose activities that match where your team is at

We’ll take you through each one of these in a little more detail.

Think expansively

The purpose of visioning is to let go of constraints and dream up potentially surprising solutions, knowing we can always come back to earth afterwards. The idea is to think big, to make the kinds of lateral, creative connections that generate game-changing ideas.

To do this, we recommend setting expectations and reminders with your team that constraints don’t matter right now. We also recommend helping your team practice expansive thinking with a warm-up. Very often, with our day-to-day jobs, our brains are trained to think pragmatically, and making the cognitive shift into a visioning session can be challenging.

Forced connections can be a great exercise for people new to expansive thinking. With this, you take 2 seemingly unrelated topics or items and force yourself to connect them in some way. You can do this with physical objects in the room you’re in, current events, items in people’s bags… anything at all.

For example, say your first pairing is an iPhone charger and an apple from someone’s lunch. How could they be related? Maybe there’s a novelty phone charger that uses the energy from an apple to charge an Apple device… kind of like the potato-powered lightbulb of kids’ science experiments. You might start with a few silly pairings to get people in the groove, then start adding in pairings related to your business or user needs.

Keep your ideation separate from your editing

Wild ideas can always be edited down. But applying too many constraints on imagination can end new ideas before they even begin. We recommend setting aside time for true ideation — even if it’s just a couple of hours — without letting feasibility concerns or fear of the unknown be the leading force in the room.

To do this, have the group mutually agree upon what the dream-big phase of your ideation session will look like, and put everyone’s mind at ease by also setting expectations for what the editing down phase will look like, complete with agreed-upon deliverables.

Backcasting is a good technique for nailing down specifics that will eventually lead towards your collective vision. Keeping your future vision in mind, start working backwards and identifying the technologies, processes, people, and key milestones that would need to be in place to reach that goal. Keep working backwards in increments until you reach the current day. Now you can use these milestones when developing your roadmap or theory of change.

Choose your ideation activities wisely

Jumping into the deep end with complex visioning exercises may be a lot for people who’ve never been involved with this kind of work before. We recommend that organizations newer to visioning exercises start off keeping it simple.

For organizations newer to visioning, try some exercises like:

Crazy eights: This is a quick sketching exercise that asks people to come up with eight ideas in eight minutes. The speed of this exercise forces people to let go of coming up with a perfect, edited idea, and instead dream up as many possible paths as they can. Looking back at what people shared, you’ll usually see patterns across participants that can illuminate new directions.
Exquisite corpse: You may have done this in school. Exquisite corpsing starts with each person creating an idea. You then pass each idea off to another person in the group, who adds on, or ideates a different part of the idea. This can encourage collaborative thinking and riffing off of others’ inspiration, as well as letting go of the impulse to step back and critically evaluate the whole picture.

For organizations more comfortable with visioning and imagination activation, try:

Desired state storyboarding: If you had a magic wand, what would the ideal state of your service or product look like? How might people use it? What’s the ideal impact? How has society changed for the better? Create a narrative telling the story of your ideal state. This can be a drawing, a newspaper headline, or a storyboard. This can help everyone align on what the long-term dream would be, and set the stage to figure out the small steps you can take towards that vision.
Four Futures Scenarios: Making scenarios is similar to our desired states exercise above, but more in-depth. You can use these scenarios to think through multiple strategies, product ideas, and services to give your organization a wide range of action plans in order to proactively make your own future, instead of operating from a reactive place. Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii was one of the first to develop and popularize 4 key future scenarios that we can use when imagining alternative futures:
- 1. Continuous Growth: the company grows infinitely and expands market share. (Tip: Stay critical! Think about when growth can be a negative thing for companies.)
- 2. Discipline: the company faces significant limitations, either imposed internally or from other forces like government regulations.
- 3. Collapse: the company struggles to survive due to things like market disruptions, economic recession, or other extreme factors. This future can be useful to think through disaster scenarios and work on “risk-proofing.”
- 4. Transformation: the company changes something fundamental, such as its mission or ownership. This scenario is most exciting when thinking about ways to innovate and find something new. You can use Transformation scenarios to think about radical new directions your company can pursue in order to stay one step ahead of market trends.

Now take a step back and look at all your futures. See any common themes or patterns? New product lines or directions your company could go that are exciting and generative? Pick one, or a couple, and try backcasting from it to see what steps you would need to take.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to expand beyond these ideas into some really creative and out-there visioning exercises, but our advice is to start small to get your organization acquainted with what visioning can yield, and also build their faith that creativity doesn’t mean letting go of practicality. Once there is more of a culture around visioning and imagination, you can try exploring larger, more “out there” techniques.

Bonus: Get an outside perspective

Sometimes, working with an outside organization can help with visioning. While no one will understand your organization better than you, outside eyes can help push past some preconceived notions and generate new ideas. They can also help set the tone for what visioning can look like, shepherding unfamiliar or suspicious parties towards the light of imagination.

Got a visioning project you’d like to collaborate on? We’d love to hear from you.

Josh Lucas-Falk June 12, 2023

What My Cancer Treatment Taught Me About Healthcare Design

Three years ago, I was diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer. This type of cancer is very unusual in otherwise healthy 42-year old people, but I caught it early enough that I was able to complete a full course of treatment, and my doctor has put me in the class of patients with the highest likelihood of long-term success.

For my type of cancer, treatment has meant 2 surgeries to remove the cancer and then 17 rounds of immunotherapy over the last three years. I think this immunotherapy is “better” than chemotherapy in terms of side effects, but it is still pretty unpleasant – it involved instilling live botulism bacteria into my bladder to stimulate a local immune response. No fun. I’ve also had an enormous number of tests – CT scans, scopes, a surprise biopsy (cancer-free, thankfully), fluid analysis, etc.

When I’m not dealing with cancer, I run a design studio that does significant work in the healthcare space. When I had my first surgeries, we were literally working on a product that helps improve scheduling of elective surgeries for a major healthcare provider. Last year, we helped another large provider redesign the service experience for patients undergoing cancer care at one of its facilities. It’s been an interesting exercise, and occasionally a useful distraction, to observe my care journey from the perspective of someone who has been responsible for designing care journeys for others. Kind of the ultimate empathy-building exercise (though I don’t recommend it).

A few things I’ve noticed along the way:

Existing online resources for people with cancer were really bad (for me).

When I first got diagnosed, I went to authoritative sites like the Mayo Clinic to learn about my type of cancer. This was a mistake. The best of these sites take the highly appropriate and responsible approach of writing about the disease with a near-clinical tone. They know that people are coming to their material to answer the big question: “Will I die from this disease?” The correct answer from a scientific perspective is to talk about morbidity over timelines across a broad population. This was actively harmful to me – it wasn’t helpful for me to see that an average person with my type of cancer has a significant chance of dying within 5 years. Intellectually, I knew that those populations included people with many comorbidities I do not have, and I knew that I was a couple decades younger than the average patient, but it still was data without comfort.

Balancing medication side effects is hard.

I came into this knowing this to be true – we literally had designed a cancer care app several years back that included medication tracking. Turns out living it gave me a much more nuanced perspective. Over the course of the last three years, I’ve very actively tried medications, observed their side effects, talked to my doctor, and rebalanced. I have the privilege of being a wealthy, educated, cis, white man, and communicating with my doctor was pretty easy for me. However, 80% of patients don’t complete the treatment I received, so I imagine that the same can’t be said for everyone. Without the tools, support or access needed to understand the side effects any one medicine has and to make changes, this process must be incredibly intimidating and discouraging for most people. It was really hard for me, and I was a best-case scenario.

I’ve never felt more like an object than when I was on a hospital bed.

When my car has an issue, I drive over to my mechanic, pull into the garage, and a couple of people descend on the car to poke at it. When I had my surgeries, I was the car. Someone literally wheeled me into an OR where there was a team of people quietly prepping surgical instruments that were about to be put into my body. I didn’t know these people, and these people only knew me as a diagnosis to resolve. It was a miraculous process – I was awake, then I fell asleep, and I woke up without cancer. It was also incredibly alienating. Because of my past work, I’m very aware that the hospital is going to want to do 5 – 7 cases in that OR on the day I had my surgery, and I sure did feel like a broken machine going in for service in a facility run as efficiently as possible.

I come away from this experience with a clearer sense of the design opportunity across this system: healthcare is dispassionate by design, and yet we humans get caught up in it and have human reactions like pain, confusion and fear. Despite my very positive experience with my providers, I didn’t get any support at all for those human reactions. And I’m just one person out of the ~2,000,000 that will have a cancer diagnosis in the US this year, which is a small fraction of the population that will interact with the entire healthcare system. That’s a whole universe of human need. I think it would take a lot of hubris to say that design has a significant role to play in mitigating all of that need, but there are certainly meaningful interventions that digital products and services could make.

Coincidentally, Insider just published this article on a JAMA paper comparing AI-driven responses to questions on Reddit to responses from doctors. It’s worth looking at – responses from the AI were rated by medical professionals as having higher quality and being more empathetic. The empathy piece is particularly relevant to me. I sought that out several times in the course of my treatment, and found it to be in really short supply.

I think what’s also clearer to me is that the scale of our healthcare situation, and its associated service problems, is so large that it’s impossible to imagine we will have enough humans to truly care for all the patients. There’s an enormous gap waiting to be filled by innovative products and design in allowing patients to better serve themselves. That Insider article above discusses the value of self-service in terms of diagnosis and triage. There’s also a huge need in supporting people with chronic conditions who may only see their doctor four times per year, but are dealing with their disease conditions every day.

I, for one, am looking forward to getting started working on these tools that will provide meaningful support between the doctor visits. Especially now that I’m done with my fucking cancer treatments.