Student Academy: A Pilot Design Thinking Workshop to Teach Community Medicine.

The medical literature shows that social determinants of health have a significant impact upon health outcomes. However, health professionals often lack the skills to address these determinants at the systems-level. Therefore, we developed a Design Thinking workshop to teach about health-related social needs and to practice designing person-centered solutions. We piloted the workshop with 53 medical and physician assistant students; 69.8% responded to the post-workshop questionnaire. Nearly 80% of students agreed the workshop helped them understand the effect of context on clinical outcomes and demonstrated how to design patient-centered solutions. However, only 50% of respondents anticipated using the Design Thinking methods in their future practice. We need to identify more effective ways to demonstrate the practical application of Design Thinking to clinical work settings.

Designing Shift Handoff Software: Clinical Learners and Design Students Collaborate Using the "Design Thinking" Process.

Handoffs in patient care responsibilities between practitioners are common in the hospital setting. Because inadequate communication can lead to patient harm, professional organizations have published recommendations and practical guides to support standardized workflow. However, currently available electronic medical record (EMR) tools rarely provide the requisite functionality to support work and often suffer from major usability flaws. Our internal medicine residency program sponsored a quality improvement initiative to improve the design of handoff tools. To support this initiative, our medical informatics program collaborated with a school of architecture and design to identify requirements and ideate interface prototypes. In this article, we describe how we used Design Thinking principles and methods to inform our product design lifecycle, create novel designs, and teach inter-professional students health systems science concepts.