The world of design is changing. Cars, homes, electronics, and even fashion are all being re-designed to be more sustainable and healthy. And yet this shift has been slower in the medical field. Shouldn’t we also be rethinking our approach to the healing profession? Medical design seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of just plugging people full of drugs that are toxic for the rest of their system: prescribed medications proximie 38m series medical design… with side effects like liver damage, respiratory failure, and heart problems; surgery with its risk for infection, blood loss…
1. Design for Sustainable Medical Professionals
Maybe it’s because doing good health care is so hard. But there are plenty of examples of people getting sicker from the drugs they’re given, despite being on the latest drug.
2. Design for Non-Fiction Health Care
The approach to exercise and physical activity hasn’t changed in a long time: to get fitter, you need a good instructor and equipment, and often some form of “personal training”. In this, we’ve reached an impasse, given that 90% of our behaviors in life simply cannot be changed using training or other methods of improvement.
3. Design for the Human-Human Interface
This is one area where I have seen a lot of advances already: electronic medical records, online prescription filling… but it’s not all good news. Many people respond negatively to our current systems, like confusing websites that are counterintuitive at best, and downright annoying at worst.
4. Design for the Doctor-Patient Relationship
There’s a big focus on medicine being “personal”. But that isn’t enough; it needs to be personal and sustainable on both sides of the relationship. Too often in medicine we push pills on people, trying to “solve” their health problems using bandages instead of finding an actual solution that makes sense for everyone.
And that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot that needs to be designed better in medicine, once we look at it with new eyes as an industry. For example, health care is a huge industry… and yet there are very few companies making things for doctors and medical offices. We don’t have the economic power of Apple or Google; but then again, our products have more value than any device ever made by those companies (your life!).
5. Designing Medical Education
We need to think differently about how we educate doctors: almost everything taught in medical school is outdated, but no one wants to interfere with “tradition”. But the practice of medicine is changing, and medical training needs to change with it.
6. Designing Hospitals
This is another area that’s both overdue for a design refresh, and yet resistant to change. And in hospitals, the biggest problem is that physicians have so much power that there’s little incentive for hospital staff to take the initiative (while when doctors are forced out of their comfort zone, they sometimes make critical errors).
7. Designing Health Care Choices
The U.S. has the most expensive medical system in the world: more than 50% of our national health care expenses go to chronic problems like diabetes, high blood pressure… and yet it’s still hard to get doctors to look at these problems as something other than an individual’s problem.
8. Designing Health Behavior
There’s lots of things we can do to change the way we behave, and get people to make better choices. The problem is that it’s a very personal thing, and that requires doctors to tread carefully into territory like “smoking cessation”, or suggesting ways for people to lose weight. A lot of doctors don’t want to “offend” their patients with this, so they stick with the tried-and-true (even if outdated) methods instead of encouraging healthier lifestyles.
9. Designing Innovation in Health Care
Maybe we should look beyond the medical field for innovative ideas. After all, the whole concept of using “time as a currency” is really only used for banking services. A lot of people don’t think about health care in these terms, but if you’re faced with a time-limited condition like cancer, it’s a great way to focus people’s efforts.
10. Designing Health Education
Most people don’t know what they need to know when it comes to health and medicine. But is the solution to just tell people what to do? Or can we use design principles to make “learning” more effective, and more enjoyable for people?
11. Designing for Health Wellness
The conventional way of dealing with a chronic illness is to “fix it”. But the truth is that these problems are often partially genetic and cannot be fixed with drugs or surgery. We need more than simple fixes; we need a new systematic approach that treats symptoms and conditions as part of a larger system.
Summary:
It’s time to start designing better medicine.
A good starting point: the new healthcare.gov, which is a website that’s an absolute disaster. A lot of design problems there, including the inability of users to navigate it quickly (it’s so ugly), and the fact that it’s just not clear what you’re supposed to do there. And while they’re having these problems, they can’t get their basic health insurance application working properly!
