The Harvard Business Review recently featured an interview with Kaiser Permanente, of Kaiser Pemanente Innovation Consultancy. In the interview he discusses how the design thinking process is used to turn front line staff (nurses) into co-designers in our hospitals.
Permanente says, “We do this by finding the few folks early on who want to share their dreams, their desires, their pain points with us. Then we observe them through a shadowing process in their expertise areas … and take them through the ideation phase where front line staff are inspired to release all of the great ideas inside of them.” To Permanente seeing those low fidelity prototypes (ideas) put into action in a hospital within few weeks is truly powerful stuff.
And thanks to this engagement with frontline staff and patients, human-centered design has created solutions that solve universal problems in health care— medication administration error, nurse shift handoff and pain management—and improve the quality of health care.