As promised, my book Design for Care is in print and available at Rosenfeld Media and Amazon, with some of the early testimonials. So many engaged designers and healthcare innovators have contributed to the book, so on its launch I’m becoming aware of the relationships and communities standing behind me as the book and their work in the book goes forward. The project’s lead designer, James Caldwell of 418QE, established the themes and design language, within the new Rosenfeld Media book design schema developed just in time for our release. Rosenfeld Media is a perfect publisher for this emerging field of healthcare design. They design and produce a beautiful and crisply readable paperback (356 pages and just 2/3 inch thick!). They provide buyers a choice of print AND 3 e-versions, or e-versions only. And they post all the images produced on Flickr with license to borrow and attribute. One of …
Design for Care – Clinical Design Competencies for Care Organizations
Design for Care: Future of Healthcare Service Innovation Friday I present a new discussion of my upcoming Rosenfeld Media book Design for Care on the Healthcare Innovation by Design Pioneers webinar series, sponsored by Dr. Sam Basta. The focus of the webinar is service design in healthcare as a practice of empathic care, and the practices and methods of Clinical Design. Context: Designing for care complements clinical care practice, improving services and creating innovative responses to complex human problems. Designers are finally starting to make inroads in the world of clinical healthcare, but are finding traditional institutions have not created a context for their contribution. Design for Care explores design practices and methods across the spectrum of healthcare (e.g., consumer, clinical, institutional system), based on the lifecycle of patients and how they navigate care services. Design for Care inspires cross-sectoral systemic design by introducing methods and practices found effective in …
Reframing innovation value – From products to service strategies
Shifting (Successfully) to a Knowledge-based Economy The fundamental basis of the knowledge-based economy has shifted from manufacturing (product-based) economies to production based on services and service management. The advanced economies of the US, Europe and Japan have already shifted largely to service provision. As this period has overlapped with the offloading of mass manufacturing to developing economies, the attendant disruption of skills, work, educational models, and management has been seen in fits and starts. Unlike the huge shift from the industrial age to the information age (that disrupted the 1970’s and led to the boom in the 1980’s), the service economy shift is highly configurable, and the disruption is not so obvious. Our companies and suppliers are now producing mixes of products, managed services, information technology, media, and self-service systems, a mix of offers and value that constantly changes. We in the advanced economies are also leading and producing a …
Technology Will Not Save Healthcare
The near term (Horizon 2) promises exciting and provocative proposals for the envisioned role of emerging technology in health services. Personalized medication. Concierge medical advising for the masses. And iPads (or whatever they become) for everyone. In Dr. Eric Topol’s The Creative Destruction of Medicine there are fantastic ideas for the possibilities of technology and their envisioned disruptions to current quagmires. The future doesn’t happen all at once, of course. We must fit these ideas into a larger frame of human need, cultural fit, and institutional services design. Personalized medication might be the easy part. Personalized medicine requires changing business models, which means changing practices, not just technology. Technology is not an independent disruptor, and always has unplanned (but not necessarily unforeseeable) consequences. Sometimes the consequences are to make some current trends stronger. Technology integration is not a democratic process. Policy, power bases, and financing interact with any technology in a …
