Customer Centric Health Care? BIF/RISD Collaboration Shifts Into High Gear

For many, the word "design" conjures images of sleek architecture, hip new products, or avant-garde fashion. But for the eight designers leading BIF's Health Care Innovation Project, it wasn't plans for a new building or new product that brought them together last week. It was the prospect of designing a better healthcare system.

The idea of using "design thinking" to solve big problems may be a relatively new idea in the world-at-large, but not for many students and faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design. That's why BIF's Patient Experience Lab partnered with RISD to run a project aimed at understanding and improving the interaction between patients and primary care physicians.

"For too long we've looked at the healthcare system—a system on the verge of collapse—from the perspective of healthcare providers and insurers, not from the perspective of the patient," said BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan. "This project will bring new visibility to how patients experience primary care and open up opportunities for improving this experience, bringing us closer to our goal of providing higher quality, lower cost healthcare."

Led by RISD faculty members Charlie Cannon and Michael Lye, the project is creating a detailed depiction of the experience patients have interacting with primary care providers. From the physical spaces where this interaction takes place to the systems and processes that dictate how information is exchanged, the RISD designers are mapping how each component contributes to the quality and effectiveness of the overall experience.

"Design thinking can be applied broadly to messy social problems like healthcare," said Cannon at a recent meeting with BIF leadership. "Instead of theorizing about the impact of design from atop the ivory tower, this project gives us the opportunity to stop agonizing about the problem and actually do the work."

"Working as an architect, the design solutions I worked on were based on a client's preconceptions. For this project, things are different with BIF providing a neutral platform to help us find the best solutions," said designer Matthew Suplee, a second year industrial design graduate student and former architect from Louisiana.

"The team can use Rhode Island as a test bed for ideas and that the state's small size and dense networks make it possible to directly connect with the people that make up the primary care system," commented Lye. The design team will put these networks to the test as they guide the students through a series of field observations and interviews with patients, care providers and insurers.