Design thinking for medical solutions and opportunities
From the past few decades, design thinking is continuously fulfilling the user’s and stakeholder’s needs by providing solutions to unsolved problems. Design thinking has played a very important role in growing many industries like consumer electronics, home appliances, transportation, gaming, IT services, etc. But when we look at the healthcare industry, still there are many design-related issues present and for which now the whole ecosystem is being adjusted.
How can design thinking improve medical solutions and save lives?
Medical devices/solutions are directly related to human lives. Any malfunctioning or error in the solutions may lead to death. Product usability, human factor, and risk management are important aspects of any healthcare solution development. Design thinking caters to all of these aspects by keeping the user at the center of the solution.
Design thinking aspect in healthcare is already adopted in developed countries, which now is being focused on patient COMFORT and on giving the BEST USER EXPERIENCE, while developing countries like India and Africa, are still struggling in the initial phase where the NEEDS of doctors and patients are not satisfying.
Design thinking involves four approaches that can be helpful for identifying the problems to provide user-centric solutions.
Empathy:
A fundamental component of design thinking is Empathy, the ability to understand the user’s needs and emotions. Good design thinking always requires a good user story rather than normal statistical data. Empathy is a part of qualitative research that requires a lot of field research, observations, and interviews. It might take days, months, and years to dig down into a user’s life and identify their lifestyle, likes — dislikes, strengths — weaknesses, and pain points.
Collaborative Thinking:
Collaborative thinking involves multidisciplinary thinking where the problem is viewed from multiple perspectives. Different ideas to solve problems are generated by considering different points of view. Collaborating all the ideas to come up with a perfect solution allows the designer to push boundaries and embrace multiple possibilities.
Rapid Prototyping and Testing:
The first two aspects are required for understanding the problem and to reach out to a solution. The third aspect is to quickly prototype these solutions and test them in actual scenarios. Rapid prototypes might be low-fidelity or high-fidelity based on the requirement.
Continuous Improvement
Success in design solutions completely depends on continuous improvements. Based on the output of rapid prototyping and testing, continuous improvement of the product, the solution can be made more desirable and effective.
Where can we use design thinking in healthcare?
Applying design thinking in healthcare may lead to several new innovations from which many lives can be saved. So, where can we use design thinking in healthcare? Design thinking can be applied in the following areas:
Patient care
Design can play an important role in documenting or digitizing the patient care process done at hospitals and medical clinics. There are numerous opportunities for new product/service development around the topic of patient care.
Patient-friendly healthcare design
Products and services built around the patient-staff interaction can help in making the process more efficient. The smoother user experience in hospitals can save time and lives.
Products for nurses rather than doctors
In developing countries like India, the patient to doctor ratio is very low because of which it’s difficult for doctors to provide individualized care. Most of the critical medical devices/solutions are designed in such a way that only medical professionals can use and interpret them. Designing the products around these factors which can make them easy to use and simpler for interpretation.
Healthcare at home
We are now in a new reforming world where COVID-19 has taught us many lessons. People really don’t want to invest their time in traveling and waiting for appointments at the hospital. Providing a non-critical healthcare solution at home can avoid patients’ hospital visits which can save time.
Cost-effective solution
There are many areas in countries like India, where patients or doctors want to adapt new medical devices/solutions but because of high costs, they can not afford it. Providing a cost-effective solution is an appreciative approach to cater to a lower and lower-middle-class audience.
Easily accessible healthcare
There are many incidents where because of medical staff’s unavailability or lack of infrastructure in the hospital, patients need to shift from one facility to another. This process increases the mortality rate in patients. Making healthcare easily accessible and connected throughout the area can help to reduce the mortality rate.
Telehealthcare
As suggested above, in many lower healthcare facilities, proper hospital infrastructure and skilled doctors are unavailable. Even in urban areas, for small health issues, people have to spend almost half a day at the hospital for appointments. Providing doctors consultation remotely can save patients as well as doctors time.
AI-based solution
AI-based health solutions are one of the biggest game-changers in the healthcare industry. Based on data and treatments available, many serious health issues can be identified at a very early stage in a patient and doctors can start the treatment to cater for that issue.
Applying design thinking in all of these areas can generate new opportunities. Ultimately all of these approaches may lead to bring down the mortality rates in patient care and help to make a HEALTHY WORLD!!
