Eyes on the Prize: Creating the Trauma Bay of the Future

Someone made a passing – albeit complimentary – comment to me at lunch yesterday saying, “Oh, you’re with BIF - you guys hold such great events.” OK, it’s true, we do hold great events. But the meat of BIF…the stuff that keeps us going…can be found in our Experience Laboratories. With so many eyeballs on us because of the summit next week. I thought I would take the time to share one of the projects under development in our Patient Lab…

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Is there any part of our current healthcare system that doesn’t need an overhaul? It’s an interesting question because while we’ve certainly experienced a series of revolutionary innovations during the past 100 years, nothing has fundamentally changed the face of healthcare delivery. Year after year, we continue to add new technologies and new protocols right on top of an already bloated and cumbersome system.

When partners came to us earlier this summer with an idea to re-envision and re-design the resuscitation or trauma bay of a hospital, we took notice. For anyone not familiar with the lingo, the trauma bay is that small, often-crowded room in the emergency department where teams of doctors and nurses must seize a brief opportunity to save a patient's life after a serious injury or major medical event.

These trauma bays are complex and critical environments. Ideally, they should be optimized for fast and effective treatment. Unfortunately, most of these rooms – even in the best emergency rooms in the country – are inhibited by generally awkward design, and as more/new equipment has been added over time, they may be poorly organized for use in high-tension environments where speed, accuracy, and access are imperative.

So this past summer, the Business Innovation Factory, Item New Product Development, the University Emergency Medical Foundation, and Rhode Island Hospital began collaborating on a project to holistically analyze a trauma bay’s space, workflow, protocols and equipment. A multi-disciplinary team spent over 200 hours in ethnographic, observation mode using established industrial design research practices, and comprehensive interviews to establish a conceptual illustration and model.

Last week, we shared results from the project and Stephen Lane of ITEM will be talking about his firm’s involvement at BIF-3. Part of our role was to create the platform for observation and experimentation. We place significant emphasis on reporting out on the project process and cataloging how the team works together, how hurdles are cleared, and the challenges the project faces in integrating input from multiple stakeholders and experiences.

Already, this re-envisioning has identified opportunities to influence the design of the environment, equipment, and technology within the trauma bay. But far from delivering just a product or service innovation, we’re after something bigger - the eventual outcome for this project is a broad-based systems change. Each of the collaborators involved expect this project to be a spring board for efforts to create national standards for how a resuscitation bay should be configured in every hospital.

That’s the focus of our experience labs and it’s why fellow innovators opt for our platform for developing and experimenting new ways to deliver value. While individual collaborators within the projects will no doubt reap the rewards of singular innovations, ultimately, the end goal is much higher.

As the first phase of the trauma bay project wrapped up, the team's business analyst began to overlay the economic business drivers for moving from today's piecemeal reality to a future design that is holistic, integrated, and standardized. Next up, a wider group of stakeholders - equipment manufacturers, hospital groups, associations of medical practitioners, and researchers - must buy into this vision as both compelling and financially advantaged. We’re keeping our eyes on the prize.

Related Links:
Learn more about our experience laboratories
Learn how you can become a member of the Business Innovation Factory

Posted October 5, 2007 02:18 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink