Designing a healthier tomorrow for everyone

Inclusivity and Digital Health Part 1

Part 2 of this series can be found here.

How can we shape the health ecosystem of the future? The enormity of the challenges facing innovation and digital transformation in healthcare cannot be overstated. While medical care and wellness have advanced rapidly in the past 100 years, they’ve still struggled to fully benefit from advances in technology.

Healthcare has multitudes of user groups, stakeholders, and other players. It’s a complex landscape of providers, payers, patients, products, and services. Innovation in healthcare is further complicated by issues such as data fragmentation, bias in machine learning, and accessibility challenges in digital health.

This two-part series explores these challenges and how they can be solved by design. Aspirationally, it also considers: how might designers use technology to put patients at the center of healthcare, so that outcomes are improved and costs are reduced?

Recent studies suggest medical errors (specifically, errors in treatment) have become the third leading cause of death in the United States. The best technology can hinder care by providing too much information, or by displaying important information in a confusing way. Just five years ago, a young cancer patient lost her life because nurses were unable to decipher the software used to support her care. Overdoses because of byzantine software user interfaces are cruelly all too common, as the patient who received 38 times their usual dose of medication can attest. As much as effective digital tools can provide access to life-saving information, they can also hinder successful administration of care because of unusable experiences or a lack of consideration for patient/provider inclusivity.

Information overload isn’t limited to visuals, either. 85% to 95% of alarms that go off in an inpatient hospital setting require no intervention by a medical professional. Alarm fatigue and other alarm issues are so pervasive that they have made the ECRI Top 10 Health Technology Hazard list since 2007, and alarm fatigue was a 2014 Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal. Again, this is a challenge that can potentially be solved through design and advancements in…