Increasing awareness, acceptance and adoption of Design as a critical C-suite priority

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Many health organisations and senior leaders within healthcare still think of design as the ‘colouring-in’ department – a nice to have if they’ve got some extra money. While design thinking and co-design are terms that are increasingly being used within healthcare, this can too often translate to a tick the box once off workshop that included a few end users.
In a future where budgets are tight and priorities move to “core” business how do we get design a seat at the healthcare c-suite table?
Former Digital Health Agency Executive Rachel de Sain will discuss her experiences in raising the profile of codesign activities including service design, cx/ux and design research amongst senior health leadership and ways to drive awareness, acceptance and adoption of Design as a crucial strategic priority for healthcare organisations.

Keynote: Medicine vs Banking – with UX and Usability as a lens

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In this presentation Chris will examine the issue of clinical usability and UX, and some of the reasons why good clinical usability and UX are difficult to achieve, particularly in the setting of EMR systems in hospitals. This is particularly important in healthcare given hospitals are where many of our sickest patients are treated. He will briefly explore contrasts with other industries – using banking as an exemplar – in doing this. Chris will also draw on usability data from around the world as well as some recently collected National data on usability for clinicians in Australia, to examine these issues. In conclusion Chris will provide some signposts to a better future with good clinical usability and UX in mind.

Design Principles for Healthcare Industry

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Design principles or guidelines play a crucial role in designing for a specific platform/ domain. They are sets of recommendations towards good practice in design. The motive to have a set of principle for a particular platform or domain is to maintain the consistency, intuitiveness, efficiency and learnability of the design.
A design principle lies between the principle in design and a specific way to implement it. It makes sure the end users basic needs are taken care of well irrespective of ethnicity, location, timeline and type.
For a designer, a design principle not only enhances the possibility of being creative and logical at the same time, as well as it increases the learning curve without being restricted in creativity.
A thorough research methodology, a deep sense of human cognition, possessing the basic common senses, repetitive and easiness of human behaviour and action are few of the factors which aided in creation of the principles.
The domain of healthcare has always demanded safety, sustainability and affordance. The niche areas of intricate human requirement for healthcare, the recognized genres of necessity in medicine, the all-time need to afford only the bests in terms of health and wellness, must have evoked a small thinking in all our mind…how can we design better for healthcare, how can we deliver only the best design to support life, how can we learn from each other and work together to heal the world?

Lessons from a UX designer with cancer.

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After a decade designing apps and testing experiences for the likes of Citibank, Samsung, McDonalds, Merck and more, Melissa has had the unique — albeit very unfortunate — experience to be in the testing seat when she was diagnosed with leukemia in 2019. Her frustrations with the healthcare industry as a patient was exacerbated by her experience in knowing that “there should be an app for this” and “this is really really stupid UX”. Fresh out of her stem cell transplant in May, be the first to learn from her harrowing experience as a cancer patient, and her even more harrowing experience as a UX designer with (currently) limited power to redesign the healthcare experience for the better.

The Porn Project: Co-Designing a digital health resource with vulnerable young people to enhance sexual health literacy

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I’ll be sharing insights on how co-design can be an effective tool for researching and designing for vulnerable populations around a sensitive Health topic like pornography. What we learnt from our experience, using co-design and how it can help create better health services and promotion resources.

Women centered contraception service design

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Through active co-design with targeted women and health care professionals we designed and commissioned a service to improve access to contraception. As a New Zealand based government owned healthcare organisation, this is an example of re-orientating health service design by stretching traditional models of commissioning to authentically placing the user in the center. I would like to share the story of how we listened and drew upon womens’ voices and developed a workforce and service delivery model to improve contraception access for low income, indigenous (Maori) and rural women. By June 2020 I will be able to share the outcomes of 8 months of service delivery in addition to service establishment and co-design insights.

Designing for Diversity in Digital Government & Essential Services: Design Considerations for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Groups with Cognitive Disabilities.

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Increasingly, government and essential services are moving online. Seeing as people have little choice in using these digital services, we need to ensure that diversity is factored in to avoid exclusion and equity issues. Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities have not always been considered as an essential target audience when designing digital services. Further, rarely is an intersectional approach to design taken, which considers CALD people with other accessibility needs, such as cognitive disability. This project involved reviewing best-practice evidence when designing for CALD groups and people with cognitive disabilities. Interviews were also undertaken with experts in CALD health and disability to develop a draft set of design guidelines. These guidelines are currently being tested with designers as to how they may be implemented in design methods. Beyond specific design guidelines, this study also found issues with how key topics are conceptualised in the design of government portals.

Designing with vulnerable people to make the right impact

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We are experiencing a growing scale of vulnerability globally, and this has been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, where we are seeing varying levels of trust in service organisations, health providers and our governments.We, as designers, are reactively designing for people in vulnerable circumstances on the back of COVID-19, and as we look forward we need to consider the impacts of our shared and compounding trauma. Those that were vulnerable, are experiencing crisis and we need to know how to identify and service people in need to move to a better future.

Designing for patient centricity in a paperless world!

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Australia is suddenly moving quickly after a slow burn over the past 10 years in digital Health. Today nearly all doctors and pharmacies can transfer prescriptions via the existing ETP systems eRx and Medisecure. The big issue is the paper script is still legally required by states and Medicare which prevents the true value of paperless scripts being seen by both the pharmacy and more importantly the consumer. But that is changing with an industry lead project to remove the legal requirements for paper for patient’s that want it. With paperless scripts we have worked hard to ensure the consumer truly chooses which pharmacy they use to dispense and supply. This design principle is critical to reduce channelling of scripts and maintain patient centricity.