Designing ‘Realistic’ Healthcare Improvement

Abstract

Realistic Medicine asks that both clinicians and patients pause, reflect, and get back to the basic principles of compassionate care. A program in Scotland shows what can be accomplished when health care professionals used design principles to improve the experience for patients and caregivers.

Domesticating the condition: Design lessons gained from a marathon on how to cope with barriers imposed by type 1 diabetes

“…Hence, analytical autoethnography in design can be recommended to help structure approaches for thinking about a particular aspect of a problem, pushing the understanding and ensuring a broader range of possibilities have been addressed. Furthermore, with the T1D runner – as well as in diabetes healthcare as Inns & Mountains have described ( Inns and Mountain, 2020 ) – what is often required is working within very complex systems that need careful unpacking before we suggest improvements and change. Thus, the design management perspective aids the integration of information gathered from the running experience – and this avoids data perception as a threat.…”

“…Ethnography to close gaps between T1D and PA: With available technology, T1D people are more involved in their self-health care and consequently demand more information, putting higher pressure on developing design strategies and on healthcare systems to successfully fill the gap between what patients expect and current healthcare practices ( Frascara et al, 2018 ). Using patients’ complex journeys to exercise development (insight 5) as a design tool helps to bridge that gap: this places user experience and empathy at the heart of healthcare improvement projects and innovation, which can then be analyzed and measured by process mapping ( Inns and Mountain, 2020 ), boosting self-observation and T1D self-management t.…”

“…Combining realistic medicine ( Inns and Mountain, 2020 ), which places the patient at the center of a shared decision-making process, with a user-centered design view can help us understand how T1D people cope with PA barriers, while also recognizing that one-size-fits-all approaches to health and social care are typically not the most effective path for the patient ( Chief Medical Officers NHSS, 2017 ). Human-centered design emerged from the field of industrial design ( Bhattacharyya et al, 2019 ) and has sought to enrich perspectives on self-care in chronic conditions, developing significant patient-centered solutions, alleviating hypoglycemia fear, and boosting confidence between others ( Kanstrup et al, 2015 ; Groeneveld et al, 2018 ).…”