Let’s talk healthcare design: Katie McCurdy
Katie McCurdy is a UX designer fixing healthcare from the inside.
She’s one of the growing ranks of designers who are based permanently inside hospitals. It’s a relativly new concept, but hospitals from London to Vermont are beginning to see the benefits of having designers on staff.
We caught up with Katie to learn more about her role, the projects she’s working on and the realities are of being a designer embedded in a healthcare world.
What’s your current role and how did you get there?
There were a few things I loved as a kid: reading mysteries and drawing. Being a designer lets me solve problems and mysteries through drawing and acting like a detective.
As an early teen I developed the autoimmune condition Myasthenia Gravis, which I’ve been dealing with for the last 25 years now. It has been a part of me for all of those years, but often very much in the background.
I went to graduate school for HCI at the University of Michigan, and then worked at R/GA in NYC. During that time I started to be more open about my condition, and I started to publicly talk about how I was using my design skills to communicate better with my doctors.
At a certain point, I realized that focusing my design practice on healthcare would allow me to do the work I love, while hopefully making a positive impact on the lives of other patients.
After leaving NYC I worked for a few healthcare start-ups and a health data non-profit until a year ago, when I started consulting pretty much full-time at our local hospital system here in Burlington, VT.
What does your workspace look like?
My colleague and fellow designer Jeremy Beaudry advocated for turning an unused office into our design space. He ordered a stand-up table, some rolling tables, and a large whiteboard for us.
The most important element of the room is the many large pieces of cardboard we use to tack up project images, sticky notes, and other things that we want to see all at once.
We’re always carrying these boards around and I like to put them out in the hall so people can encounter them as they walk by.
The space is attractive and fun, and people like to pop in and say hi. It feels different from any other space in the hospital. I hope that we’re helping to shift people’s conception of what ‘work’ means — we’re having fun and being creative, and we’re also working through some really complicated problems.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on a bunch of different things right now. We are working on wayfinding inside the physical space of the hospital, and I’m also working with a team to help redesign the website.
I’m also working on making improvements to the patient portal, as well as workflow improvements in the medical record. I’m kind of all over the place, which is hard — I’m trying to find the right amount of focus.
You ran a design sprint to improve the wayfinding in your hospital. What were some of the healthcare specific challenges you encountered?
The great thing about this: we didn’t really run into any big challenges. We didn’t really need to get anyone’s ‘buy-in’ to solve a brief or undertake a 3-hour design intervention to test one of our core design assumptions; that splitting the hospital into nature-based zones would support better wayfinding.
The short sprint had a big impact and is now one of the most important stories we are telling as we carry this project forward.
What’s are the biggest challenges you’ve found working as a UX designer inside a hospital?
I think the culture issues related to working in a large, established institution have been some of the biggest challenges for me. There are many people who have worked there for 20 or 30 years, and there is a lot of institutional culture around ‘the way we do things.’ Lots of people are fairly comfortable working within the defined edges of their jobs, and change doesn’t come easy.
However, the work Jeremy and I have been doing along with our teams has also been welcomed and seen as a refreshing change. We’re collaborating more with patients, staff, and clinicians and bringing their voices and opinions into our design process. People like to feel heard and valued, and I hope that we are modeling new ways of accomplishing that.
Are there any common misconceptions/myths about what you do at the hospital?
A misconception might be that a designer is there to pick colors and make things pretty. We’re trying to help people understand that we’re there to help solve big problems.
How has your design approach adapted for a healthcare environment?
The access to people (patients, clinicians, and staff) has allowed me to be more rigorous about interviewing and observing end users. I’ve adopted a ‘fly by’ / drop-in approach where I’ll just pop in to an office and see if anyone can talk with me right there and then.
Scheduling can get a little insane, and more often than not I can grab a few minutes of someone’s time by stopping by.
Scheduling can get a little insane, and more often than not I can grab a few minutes of someone’s time by stopping by. I also like to get face time with people rather than talking on the phone — it helps me build better relationships with them.
This way of working is fun, helps me feel like a detective, and it would not be possible (or quite so easy, anyway) if I were working outside the hospital.
You’ve written about why hospitals should be employing designers. What do you think is the obstacle to that becoming the norm?
I think it’s awareness of what designers do. That’s why I wrote the article — hoping to help people at smaller hospitals understand how human-centered design can help solve problems and facilitate change. My dad read the article, understood it, and sent it to the CEO of a small hospital in Michigan. That’s my goal — for the layperson to understand and articulate the value of design in a hospital environment.
What are some of your favourite design (or healthcare design) resources?
Conferences: Medicine X, HXRefactored, Mayo Transform (I’ve never been but it seems great) and Interaction which is a design conference put on by the Interaction Design Association.
Podcast: I have been listening to What is Wrong with UX — an awesome no-BS podcast from Laura Klein and Kate Rutter.
Books: Too overwhelming to think about. There are plenty of ‘best UX books’ lists out there. I’ve been getting a lot of value from reading clinical autobiographies from Oliver Sacks (On the Move) and Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air). These are both extremely well-written memoirs, and both discuss what they learned during the transition from doctor to patient.
Staying updated: I stay pretty current on healthcare + technology from Rock Health’s great newsletter updates, and mobihealthnews. And from dropping in to see my friends at the Study Hall work space in Burlington, where my pals seem to always know about the latest new products and technologies.
And finally, what’s coming up for you that you’re excited about
I’m excited to be heading to Medicine X this fall, after a trip to Scotland with my husband.
Questions from James Turner and answers by Katie McCurdy who’s currently a UX Design Consultant at the University of Vermont Medical Centre.
Designing Health.care tells stories from designers working on the front lines of healthcare transformation. Want to take part? Drop us an email.
