Family Well-Being

Client

In partnership with Children’s Health in Dallas, Texas, the Patient Experience Lab is imagining, designing, and testing new models for care. These models integrate both clinical and self-enabled approaches to fostering well-being, and are designed with input from healthcare professionals, Dallas families, and the communities that support them.

Design Challenge

How might we shift the current experience of health and wellness toward one that is understood and claimed by families and children, rather than simply available to them?

Traditional models for care often don’t recognize the integral role families and communities play in nurturing a child’s well-being. Many approaches to health and wellness service provision are currently focused on treatment of illness and injury, rather than on acknowledgement of these influences. In fact, the environments in which children live, learn, and play – and the health beliefs and behaviors that they encounter in them – are big influences on their health and development.

BIF and Children’s Health System of Dallas recognize Dallas families as an essential resource in understanding the circumstances that impact their well-being, and as a key catalyst for enabling the conditions that encourage it. By including families, trusted agents, and community stakeholders in every stage of the design and experimentation processes, we can leverage the existing capabilities of Dallas communities to positively impact families’ well-being – physically, mentally, socially and spiritually.

Approach

Based on the understanding that any transformational change to a current experience or model requires time and deeper insight, this work is being conducted in several stages: research to form a working definition of family well-being; co-creation of new imagined experiences of family well-being; collaboration to develop community capabilities to bring these experiences to fruition; and experimentation of these new models in the real world.

All phases will be collaborations among Children’s Health, the BIF Patient Experience Lab, and the families and community members of Dallas. Family members are the principle source of the qualitative data that will shape the definition of family well-being, and will play a central role in the co-creation of new experiences, the identification of capabilities, and the implementation of strategies. The Patient Experience Lab will rely on the feedback from families, trusted agents, and Children’s Health System to inform all design and implementation processes.

Impact Statement

By adopting a family-centric and community-centric lens in understanding the factors and conditions that affect a child’s health and wellness, we believe that it is possible to craft a shared vision of family well-being experience. This shared vision will inspire collective participation in the process of improving health and well-being – allowing Children’s Health to deliver greater value in the areas with the best potential for impact, and that matter most to the users of the healthcare system: its patients, providers, administrators, and community stakeholders.