Let’s talk healthcare design: Samantha Dempsey
After roles in some of the best known names in the industry, Samantha Dempsey is now a Senior Human Centered Designer at a safety net hospital in Minneapolis.
She’s working in the Upstream Health Innovations team at Hennepin County Medical Center which serves a large, underprivileged community.
It’s unusual to have an in-house designer at this kind of facility, so we caught up with Samantha to hear about her career so far, and the current projects she’s been working on.
What’s your current role and how did you get there?
My path to healthcare design was a bit twisty. It started when I was an illustration undergraduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. In my first few years at RISD, I was painting portraits of microorganisms and finding ways to describe health and biology through art. It wasn’t until I took an amazing class called “Communicating Medical Risk” that I realized that as a designer I could do more than describe health. I could influence the way that healthcare happened.
While at RISD I received a Maharam STEAM Fellowship. This took me to the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation where I explored what role my perspective as an illustrator and designer could play in a clinical design studio. I began to see the real-life improvements that design could bring to the delivery of healthcare; I was hooked.
Next, I began to explore the intersection of technology, gameful design, narrative, and health as a Senior Behavior Change & Experience Designer at at Mad*Pow, a design consultancy focusing in healthcare. Working as a consultant exposed me to a lot of the problems in healthcare in rapid succession and let me try my hand at using many different methods to solve them.
After Mad*Pow I decided to go inside the belly of the beast as an in-house designer in a health system. I joined Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) and began designing with underserved communities and leveraging the resources and expertise of a safety net hospital to facilitate community flourishing.
What’s it like working in an agency on healthcare projects compared to working in an in-house team?
In-house and agencies are two different beasts. The great part about designing for health in an agency is that you get to see and solve a lot of different problems very quickly. You get exposure to a wide breadth of what designing for health means, and you get to create solutions that touch many different aspects of health. You learn a lot quickly.
Designing in-house means that you are concerned first and foremost with health outcomes. In agency design, your measure of success is often patient engagement, number of clicks, client satisfaction, etc. In an in-house design team, you’re always thinking long-term and big picture. Will this improve a patient’s health over the next ten years? And how does this affect the health system’s business model?
What projects are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on a few great projects, all of which are aimed at addressing the social determinants of health, and expanding the perception of healthcare’s remit.
Transportation and access
We’re piloting a program that allows patients to receive free rides to their clinical appointments. This is founded on the idea that transportation is an integral part of health and that a health system should be responsible for ensuring access. We’re also working on designing a business model that would allow health systems like HCMC to sustainably fund transportation.
Health and housing
We’ve been doing a lot of research to understand the link between health and housing. There’s data out there proving that when you don’t have stable housing, your health is compromised. As a health system, we have the opportunity to get involved upstream and engage in housing before someone experiencing homeless or housing instability gets sick.
Priorities conversation
We are designing tools to help patients communicate their priorities in a clinical encounter. It could be getting the rash checked out, finding shelter for the night, or filling a hungry belly. We’re helping both patients and providers understand that all of these things are “health” and can be addressed by a health system. We’re then connecting them with community and social resources so that care team members can help patients address these “non-medical” health concerns.
How has your design approach adapted for a healthcare environment?
Designing for healthcare is different from designing for other things because people using healthcare are usually sick. When you’re labeled as “ill” or a “patient”, it can change a lot about how you perceive the world, your capabilities, and your priorities. When designing for healthcare, we need to be mindful of this altered state of consciousness and support people in ways that may be different from our day-to-day lives.
We are making choices that may have life and death consequences and that will certainly affect the quality of people’s lives.
Our responsibility as designers is another thing that comes to the forefront when designing for healthcare. We are making choices that may have life and death consequences and that will certainly affect the quality of people’s lives. We need to make sure that our goals and values as designers are always in line with those of the people we are designing for and with.
You’ve been involved in healthcare design for a while now. What trends have you noticed in the last few years and where do you see this going?
The trend I’ve noticed is that designers are realizing that the deep cause of many problems in health care (and beyond) are caused by policy. You can only go so far into designing for health before you hit a regulatory wall or discover that a law is the reason behind some inexplicable institutional behavior. I see designers feeling for the cracks in policy, trying to understand what role we can play in that world.
You’ve done a lot of work around the ethics of design, such as leading workshops to help teams create design “hypocratic’ oaths. Do you think this is a well understood problem in healthcare design?
Discussions about the ethics of design have been going on for decades, but recently they have been gaining traction. I believe this is because the design profession and the larger world have just begun to realize the power modern-day designers wield. Designers are increasingly responsible for our education, our healthcare, and our public policies. As a profession, we are realizing that we have no agreed upon guidelines or processes to help us understand what constitutes an ethical or an unethical design choice. Where other professions like doctors have the Hippocratic Oath to guide their decisions, designers are left to figure it out as individuals.
The Designer’s Oath was Ciara Taylor’s and my response (powered by Mad*Pow) to this ethical void that designers find themselves in. The Designer’s Oath is a tool that helps multidisciplinary teams define the ethical guidelines of their engagement. It facilitates team-based conversations about the ethics of a project and helps teams create ethical guidelines.
We’re just starting to figure out what role designers have in this brave new world. Healthcare design is helping to bring tough questions to the forefront because in healthcare, every design decision has the potential to affect someone’s ability to flourish. We as a profession must think deeply about our responsibilities to those we design for.
What are some of your favourite design (or healthcare design) resources?
I love going to conferences to keep up with the great work happening in this space. I’m a fan of the Mayo Clinic’s Transform conference as well as Healthcare Refactored for straight up healthcare design. As an illustrator, I love the Graphic Medicine conference. It discusses the intersection between comics and healthcare and never fails to give me a fresh perspective.
I also make a point to seek out design inspiration at non-healthcare conferences. Different Games is a fantastic conference that dives deep into how games and gameful design can foster diversity and inclusivity. And finally, Better World by Design is a great conference sparking conversations about designing for social impact. And I’ll be speaking there at the end of September!
And finally, what’s coming up for you that you’re excited about
I’m thrilled to be working on a side project with a small and dedicated team of designers, public health specialists, and clinicians to design interventions that increase hope and purpose in underserved communities.
Last year, Olga Elizarova and I began designing with teens in recovery from drug addiction and with urban communities experiencing gang violence. We started seeing patterns and began understanding that a lack of hope and/or feeling of greater purpose can have profound effects on both the health of an individual and on the ability of a community to thrive.
We’re bringing together this interdisciplinary group to create open-sourced tools and processes so that other designers and community leaders can share these interventions with their own communities.
Questions from James Turner and answers by Samantha Dempsey who’s a Senior Human Centered Designer at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.
DesigningHealth.care tells stories from designers working on the front lines of healthcare transformation. Want to take part? Drop us an email at hello@jamesturner.co.uk.
