The economic returns of Design Thinking in Healthcare

The economic profitability of Design Thinking in healthcare

Implementing Design Thinking in healthcare, not only provides improved user experience, but also implies high profitability for the health organization. Some studies as carried out by Innovate UK guarantee that for every euro invested in design, companies can enter up to 20 additional, up 4 € in net operating income and a return of 5 € on the increase exports.

In practice, many interventions have been developed in the health field using the Design Thinking methodology, proving beneficial at different levels. For example, the department of cardiology at  Rigshospitalet came to save the amount of € 536,000 in operating costs, focusing on the significant experiences of patients and service planning on this basis. Another example is found in the Oslo University Hospital, where they reduced by 90% the waiting time of breast cancer diagnosis, optimizing processes from the perspective of the patient.

Design Thinking as a strategy for innovation in medical device

A study conducted in the US concluded that 2 million people acquired infections after being admitted to a hospital, ending in death annually 100,000 of them. In addition, each infection involves a cost to the organization, it is estimated that around $ 47,000 in the United States, ie, the annual cost would correspond to 5.7 billion dollars.

One of the proposals that could be made with the naked eye without further analysis is to perform a handwashing protocol either by the classic soap and water or using alcohol gel dispenser. However, more than 50% of American professionals do not use either of these methods, so that intervention, if carried out, would be a real fiasco.

Applying Design Thinking the problem was analyzed from the perspective of the professionals themselves, in an effort to find out the reasons for not carrying out these hygiene protocols. It was found that these professionals do not consider it necessary to wash their hands when entering and leaving the rooms of patients also perform an average of 5 visits per patient in a day’s work.

Making an analysis, it was found that health professionals throughout a working day, had 70 points of contact with patients, which would wash their hands 70 times a day. This represents a spending excessive time for these professionals, along with a great difficulty to carry out the protocol because they have no capacity at all points of contact to carry out cleaning hands.

Fuente: Chicago Magazine

Analyzing the problems set out to design a new method to make available to carry out the protocol. The solution reached was the SwipeSense, a system that combines hand hygiene at the point of care with the use of data in real time to eliminate reliance on manual observations and increase compliance with infection control procedures. The results of cleaning hands among professionals increased to 64%.