Design for Health (2017) Design for Health – Published by Routledge May 2017, Edited by Emmanuel Tsekleves and Rachel Cooper (Editorial overview of book and chapters) Chapter 3: Soft Service Design around the Envelope of Healthcare (Peter Jones) Better alternatives to improving population health have been sought by healthcare policymakers and the front-line clinicians who see patients in everyday care settings. While public health experts and primary care clinicians recognize the significant effects on health from social determinant factors they have limited tools for addressing these causal factors in their patient’s lives. Systemic improvements to a population’s social ecology are considerable challenges from within the “envelope” of a healthcare system. The service design challenge I propose and aim to answer is that of, can we better intervene outside of and around the envelope of the healthcare system? In mental health and primary care contexts, we find that systemic factors and social …
Participation in Healthcare Systems: Patients aren’t Customers
My favorite healthcare blog KevinMD posts every so often with an eloquent heartfelt piece on the problem of patients as customers. In This is Why Patients Cannot be Customers Dr. Tanya Feke points out that: A study in the British Journal of General Practice showed how patient satisfaction surveys can be skewed. More than 980,000 patients were surveyed across 7,800 practices. Doctors who prescribed more antibiotics were perceived more favorably than family doctors who doled out fewer antibiotics. When you consider U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence estimates more than 10 million antibiotic prescriptions are inappropriately prescribed every year (antibiotics do not treat colds and other viral infections), there is a serious disconnect. We continue to borrow from inappropriate language constructs to make arguments about desired outcomes without thinking through the anticipatory ancillary effects. If we propose that patients are persons, as Tanya does, that’s a start. Individuals …
Announcing RSD5, Relating Systems Thinking to Design 5
RSD5 Systemic Design for Social Complexity Relating Systems Thinking and Design 5 Symposium OCAD University Toronto, Canada October 13-15, 2016 The RSD series has advanced an agenda for exploring a strong integration between systems thinking and design to take on the most important challenges facing our planet today. RSD4 held in Banff, Canada September 2015 brought together nearly 200 people together from around the world to explore new dimensions in design-led systems design, transformation and research. The keynote videos are now available, and the full proceedings are published online. Join us in the vibrant metropolis of Toronto, October 2016 for the fifth symposium hosted at OCAD University to accelerate a convergence of design, social, and technology fields toward co-creating humanized (eco)systems. The theme of Systemic Design for Social Complexity represents our continuing focus on advanced systemic and service design for contemporary and futures-oriented societal concerns. All social systems become complex over time, developing …
Edge Practices: How Do You Measure Value?
Every design discipline (even industrial design) has had to develop its best rationale for the question “why should we keep/hire/use you guys?” If they keep asking, “what is it you do again?” you may have more work to do more on strategic communication. Emerging practices will always be considered marginal at first, within an organization. Practices (not processes) are formed from collective agreement, and are often tacitly formed. When an organization first develops a core process, such as project management, it starts as a practice. Outcomes are uncertain, its value to cost is assessed. When a practice, such as user experience, becomes vital to every project, it becomes formalized as a process. You can tell practices because they have small in-groups, communities of practice that may form to develop methods, ensure quality, share learning, as in nearly all user experience groups in the past. (I can speak as having been …
