Workflow Efficiency
As part of the Design Strategy class, a staple of the Engineering Design and Innovation curriculum, our studio partnered up with the Dr. Lyle Berkowitz and the Northwestern Memorial Hospital system in order to address the areas of healthcare that need the most attention going forward. My design team was directed to focus on the workflow efficiency of a primary care team while others in the class were focusing on virtual care’s role in healthcare in the coming future.
Our hospital systems are going to be overloaded in 20 years
Something that is often forgotten about the field of healthcare is that it is a business. As more and more demand is brought upon the system by the inevitable increase of the US population and the increase of availability to these people due to factors such as the Affordable Care Act, changes will have to be made. With this as well as business constraints given to us by our client in mind, we set out to design a workflow that made sense for a hospital 20 years from now.
During the project, we performed a wealth of primary and secondary research in order to as complete an understanding of healthcare as we could. We talked with a variety of healthcare professionals and patients, read literature from respected sources, and conducted hospitals visits of our own as patients, observers, and designers.
We presented our findings and thoughts on solutions at studio sessions twice a week. During these studio sessions we gave and received critique and advice regarding the various findings and proposals that teams were producing. Parallelly, we conducted weekly calls with our client to discuss our progress and next steps. All this culminated in a 20 minute presentation by each of the 4 teams in front of Dr. Berkowitz. The presentation is linked to below.
