Healthcare Design - October 2019 - 15

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TA K E F I V E

DR. STEVEN
MERAHN

The managing director at Thinkwell
Health discusses the top five trends and
issues getting his attention right now.
1 . D E S I G N M E A N S M O R E T H A N W H AT
C A N B E D R AW N O R B U I L T

While it's clear what "design" means to this industry, there's still a lot of confusion among healthcare
professionals as to the term's definition. Being a
physician, as I come to understand its principles
and practices, I see applications everywhere including in the design of clinical processes and operations. I'm especially interested in experience
design, which is more of a sociotechnical process
that focuses on goal-directed interactions of patients with systems of care. These interactions take
place in both built and virtual environments, but
also involve designing for activation, engagement,
and connection between patients and professionals in order to orchestrate and optimize transformative health-related experiences.
2 . T H E PAT I E N T E X P E R I E N C E I S N ' T
A L WAY S S AT I S F Y I N G

When most healthcare executives refer to "patient
satisfaction," they're referring to the surveys that
are increasingly used by the Centers for Medicare
and Medicare Services to assess quality and can
influence revenue streams. The linkage between
these surveys and financial vitality has sometimes
limited the view of experience design to concepts
of customer service or hospitality, and the implementation of programs specifically designed to
influence scores on survey questions. The bigger
problem is that not all healthcare experiences are
pleasant (a spinal tap is not necessarily satisfying,
no matter how life-saving). Healthcare design can
serve a broader role by considering how the interactions with the built environment can communicate concern and empathy to the patient (a locker
to store belongings during a procedure) in concert
with the care delivery process. This allows the patients to fully appreciate the value of the experience, satisfying or not, to their quality of care and
quality of health.

by discipline while professional identities generally prevail along specialty or disciplinary lines.
However, it's also a vulnerability because many
patients require care across disciplines, and interdisciplinary is not the same as integrated. Designers can help solve this by taking lessons from other
industries who've dealt with similar obstacles. For
example, in theme parks, food, retail, and rides are
all different "departments," but they work together
seamlessly and have procedural consistency across
sites, benefitting the consumer experience.
4 . L O G I C D O E S N ' T A L WAY S P R E VA I L
WHEN IT COMES TO OUR HEALTH

Healthcare is pretty much left-brained-grounded
in structured knowledge and informational learning, detail-oriented, and driven by reason. Even in
the face of such knowledge, patients and families
tend to be more right-brained about their health:
emotional, imaginative, intuitive, and theoretical. Sometimes the right-brain functions can overwhelm the left brain's capacity to sense, receive, and
respond to information, which can affect a patient's
ability to understand his/her situation and make
good decisions. If we want to improve health systems' capacity to improve the quality of health of
patients and communities, we need to design for the
right brain and account for the tactile and emotive
experiences that are associated with trust and connection and serve as incentives (or deterrents) for
desired behavior.
5 . P L A N F O R S Y S T E M FA I L U R E

Healthcare providers may consider the risks of
treatment decisions, but they rarely consider designing around the failure scenarios for the systems or locations of care in which they work. There
are common and predictable patterns of systemlevel failure in every provider network, such as
timeliness of delivery of abnormal lab results,
seamless outpatient handoffs between departments or providers, or sustained communications
with and between patients and providers. Anticipating these scenarios and planning alternatives
when things go wrong require thinking of healthcare as a "time-space" activity and tracking and
mapping patterns of discontinuous movements
through physical and virtual space that are required based on common diagnostic or treatment
themes.

3 . D E PA R T M E N T S A N D S E R V I C E L I N E S
CAN'T BE SILOS

One of the greatest strengths of the American medical system is our commitment to subject-matter
expertise as a dominant organizing principle. As
such, departments and service lines are organized

Want to share your Top 5? Contact Executive
Editor Anne DiNardo at anne.dinardo@emerald
expo.com for submission instructions.

OCTOBER 2019

Healthcare Design - October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Design - October 2019