Applying design thinking process to healthcare
I believe that the human centered design process enables highly complex and regulated industries like healthcare to build better products/services.
Human centered design thinking grounds itself in a few foundational principles, including: spend equal if not more time understanding the problem you are trying to solve; identify and deeply understand your user; and make sure your user is involved along the product development pathway. A design-thinker must embody a few mindsets, including, a beginner’s mind, a bias-towards action, and support radical collaboration.
Over the years design thinking has led to innovation in otherwise stagnant industries and has carved out a place for itself in healthcare. The human centered design process promises seemingly wild claims — improved patient engagement, changing behavior, designing products that have higher compliance, etc. However, when health systems implement this process or hire consultants to do it for them, it results in beautiful decks, frameworks and conceptual ideas that never really see the light of day. The promise of human-centered design thinking within this complex space is rightfully questioned.
Given my experiences in healthcare, I’ve come to understand that the classic design-thinking process needs to be modified in order for it to be of true value. In this initial post, I’ve taken a stab at articulating three modifications that would enable the design thinking process to be more successful in healthcare.
1. Balancing a beginner’s mindset with an expert’s experience
One of the key mindsets of the human centered design process is to maintain a beginner’s mind. Openness, the absence of pre-conceived notions, and the unbiased mind characterize a beginner’s mind. However, in highly regulated industries like healthcare, a deep understanding of ecosystem dynamics, regulatory landscape and the inherent complexity of implementing ideas is essential to building products/services that can have an impact.

2. Design not just for your user
Healthcare is a unique industry in that the user who consumes the product/service is rarely the user who pays for the product/service. As a consequence, the design thinking process needs to be applied to distinct user groups in parallel. A large number of companies in healthcare fail not because the product/service was poorly designed, but rather the team failed to design for the user who pays for it.
3. Innovate the prototyping and testing process itself
The process of rapid prototyping and iterative testing within healthcare is often really difficult to execute. There are a few reasons why:
- Be creative around accessing your user group. Let’s say you are designing an app for type II diabetic patients. You will need to aggregate a group of patients with type II diabetes who want to be your users. Recruiting patients is fraught with operational and regulatory complexities. As a design team, developing a roadmap that allows you time to build a user cohort becomes increasingly important. Additionally, breakdown your designs. Identify parts of your product/service that can be tested with anyone. Start there!
- Use hypothesis driven prototyping and testing: Human centered design thinking purports low-resolution prototyping, i.e., instead of building that diabetes app, quickly sketch it out on a piece of paper and get a user to respond to it. Low-resolution prototyping is inherently qualitative. The healthcare industry is not used to this process at all. Most of healthcare waits for academic evidence before the stakeholders are willing to try a product/service. What if you used a hypothesis driven prototyping & testing process? Identify the core question you want to test, develop a hypothesis, get a n users, collect the evidence, and respond to your hypothesis. While not truly quantitative, you have developed a language and a process that resonates a little more within healthcare.
Background of the author:
Samira Daswani is a graduate student of Stanford’s new Masters in Design Impact program. She has been apart of a few health-technology startups, worked as an Analyst at McKinsey & Company and has accrued valuable experience in global health. She is currently applying the process of human centered design thinking to the space of physician wellness, patient engagement and access to mental-health.