Designing My Own Health
I thought I was too healthy to need better healthcare. I was wrong.
Iam a young, fit adult with no chronic diseases and a healthy diet. I’ve spent a lot of my career as a product and industrial designer working on healthcare projects like respirators for newborns and connected health equipment, but I’ve never been my own target customer.
When I left IDEO to join Forward, I was excited to design a new healthcare system from scratch, combining sensors, machine learning, and mobile access with a team of physicians pushing the boundaries of how to manage people’s health in smart, effective, and simply pleasant ways.
Forward’s mission is easy to get behind, but in honesty it also appeared removed from my personal needs. It was hard to understand why I would need 24/7 mobile access when my biggest health issue to date was a shoulder injury. I figured Forward was primarily useful for people with complex chronic conditions and as I aged it would become more relevant to me.
That was until I ended up in hospital for 8 days, getting close to losing part of my colon and small intestine, and perhaps worse.
I woke up on a Sunday morning with what felt like a pulled abdominal muscle. My first instinct was to do exactly what I normally do about minor health issues: wait and assume things will improve. My second thought was to pull out an app. Since Forward employees also use our service as members, I opened my app and flagged my issue. There was no “visit”, self-diagnosis, or exam required. I didn’t need to think about what to do — I just wrote what I felt and let our triaging process handle the rest.
Forward’s Care Team called ahead to the ER, sent over my documents, and upon arrival an ER nurse was already briefed and took me straight in without a wait.
The CT scan revealed an already-ruptured appendix, with the rapidly spreading infection affecting my surrounding organs. My bladder would later stop functioning, I went through pain I’ll gladly never revisit, and I spent 8 days in hospital. If I hadn’t had the means to easily message my doctor and get an immediate response on a Sunday morning, I would have ignored the pain. I arrived close to the point at which my colon and small intestine might have needed partial removal, and perhaps worse. Instead I made a reasonably easy recovery.
This isn’t how I intended to conduct user research for my job.
The unexpected upside of this episode was first-person, deadly serious insight into today’s in-patient medical care. I spent my 8 days at a leading US hospital, with surprisingly enjoyable highs and utterly rock-bottom lows, and learnt first hand what makes and breaks a positive healthcare experience.
My primary lessons as a patient and a designer working in healthcare:
- Easy access to preventive care is critical. Nothing matters more than catching issues before they become more serious and most costly. Preventive care is our number one focus at Forward, and a critical challenge in American healthcare.
- Technology clearly improves outcomes when done well. My barcoded wrist bracelet avoided a mistaken blood draw at 5 AM, but I also watched cumbersome software foster miscommunication and exacerbate stress for the nurses on shift—and for me. It was a striking lesson in the importance of getting technology right. The divide here between what’s possible and what exists must cost lives every day.
- The human moments matter as much as the tech. Human moments still define the healthcare experience and influence recovery. Whether it was my physician at Forward following up and making me feel heard and cared for, or a hospital nurse warmly introducing herself by name and coaching my recovery, empathy makes a big difference in an otherwise awful moment.
- Patients crave and deserve to understand their situation. A patient may be receiving flawless care, but if what’s going on isn’t explained, it’s unsettling and spreads anxiety to loved ones and transfers frustration to nurses. Expectations for keeping informed need to be set and met. Put simply, most patients are mentally able and should be treated as such. Having insight into each step of my diagnosis and plan mattered to me and helped me recover faster.
These eight days in hospital taught lessons we’ll use across Forward’s product development, and reinforced my motivation to provide preventive care to as many people as we can — especially to people like me who don’t think they need it.
