Let’s talk healthcare design: Julie Guinn
Julie Guinn wears two hats, and she likes teaching others to do the same.
That’s why as well as being an Experience Designer in a hospital, she’s also training doctors to become designers.
We caught up to hear about her combined role at Jefferson, what she’s learnt from a career in tech and how that’s shaping her work in healthcare.
What’s your current role and how did you get there?
I work at Jefferson, which includes Jefferson Health and Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia. I have a dual role here: I’m an experience designer in the Center for Digital Innovation and Consumer Experience and I co-direct the JeffDESIGN program at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College.
Before I moved into healthcare, I worked as a designer and user researcher at software and tech companies on the West coast for about 10 years. Healthcare always interested me because I love working on complex design problems — problems that involve people, systems and spaces, and that require integrating the needs and perspectives of multiple stakeholders.
I grew up in Philadelphia and my family is here, so when an opportunity to move back and pursue a long-time interest came up, I jumped on it. Once I was here, a colleague connected me with Dr. Bon Ku who founded JeffDESIGN. The program introduces med students to the mindsets, methods and tools of design through hands-on workshops and applied projects in the Jefferson health system. It’s the first program of its kind in the country. It’s founded on the belief that creative problem solving and change leadership will be critical skills for the next generation of physicians.
How did you time working for tech companies set you for your current role in healthcare?
Working in big companies taught me how to be patient with and even find some satisfaction in the process of design projects as opposed to just focusing on the final output. An early manager referred to it as the “work of work” — basically, all the meetings, the email threads, the negotiations, the presentations and documentation. Though that may not strictly be part of designing, it’s a big part of being a designer in a large organization.
How has your design approach adapted for a healthcare environment?
This was a big adjustment and one I’m still learning about. Healthcare delivery is a prime example of a “wicked problem”. The complexity, in terms of the number of stakeholders, the diversity of needs, complexity of workflows, and pervasive regulatory and safety requirements — it dwarfs anything I’d encountered in consumer product development or even finance.
My biggest learning has been around estimating a practical scope for incoming projects. For example, in the patient journey mapping project I mentioned earlier, my initial scope was essentially ”‘patients visiting the ED”. I quickly realized that encompassed far too much to get actionable insights in a reasonable timeframe. In the end, a workable scope turned out to be “low-acuity patients getting blood drawn in Fast Track” (an area of the ED that’s a bit like Urgent Care).
What projects are you working on at the moment?
In my primary role as an experience designer, I work on a pretty wide range of projects. Over the summer, I was exploring applications for VR in medical simulation training and for IoT devices in inpatient settings. Before that, I worked on a quality improvement project, mapping the patient journey through the ER to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for decreasing length of stay.
Currently, I’m working on redesigning the system we used to enter and manage clinician information. This might not sound sexy, but it’s an incredibly complex and important system. It feeds everything from our EHR to our consumer-facing websites and 1000s of employees and patients interact with it. So, creating an accurate, efficient and — dare I say? — enjoyable experience is a huge opportunity.
As part of your role on the JEFFdesign programme, you teach design skills to trainee doctors. How you do that and what challenges you see?
For individuals and teams just looking to get a feel for what it’s about, I’ve found the design thinking immersion pioneered at the Stanford d.School, where participants work through a full design cycle from empathy through idea iteration, translates pretty well to medical and academic settings. Given the environment, it’s easy to find relevant challenges. A few we’ve used successfully: helping admitted patients understand who’s who on their care team; improving staff communication during codes in the ED, and making the admissions process less scary for pediatric patients.
The biggest challenge I’ve found is that clinical audiences tend to want to find the single ‘right’ or ‘best’ answer as quickly and accurately as possible. It takes some coaching to keep them in a divergent thinking mode. Once they have multiple ideas, they can be equally anxious about narrowing for fear of making a ‘wrong’ choice. As designers, being comfortable with ambiguity and making intuitive leaps is part of our process, but that’s definitely not the norm in other professions.
How do you keep doctors involved in design after they finish the JEFFdesign programme?
The med school curriculum is four years and we’re just accepting our third JeffDESIGN class in the spring, so none of our students have graduated yet! I’d love to see an online community — even something as simple as Facebook group or Slack channel — for alumni to ask questions, share advice, and support one another. Being in the vanguard of a movement and having a different perspective than your peers and colleagues can be isolating. Having a community that ‘gets it’ is essential.
What’s the ‘can’t be without’ item in your design toolkit?
Whiteboard markers. There’s nothing more distressing than finding yourself in a complex discussion and the whiteboard marker tray is empty.
And finally, what’s coming up for you that you’re excited about
Both! I’m visiting to Italy for the first time this fall and I’ll also be speaking at the IDSA Medical conference in San Franciso about doctor-designer collaboration.
Questions from James Turner and answers by Julie Guinn who’s a Experience Designer at Jefferson in Philadelphia.
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.
