A service design approach to healthcare innovation: from decision-making to sense-making and institutional change

摘要

Healthcare is facing complex challenges that demand profound service system innovation. Service design offers an opportunity to move beyond explanatory research and take an action-oriented approach that combines research rigor with relevance to foster innovation in healthcare. We present three research projects that illustrate different ways service design can enable health service system innovation to create uplifting changes in wellbeing. The first research project utilizes a decision-making approach to support design teams in developing value co-creating technology-enabled services for skin cancer prevention. The second project employs a sense-making approach through participatory design to develop a National Electronic Health Record that addresses the multiple and conflicting goals of healthcare network actors. The third project uses an institutional change approach to develop a new digital service for youth with mental health issues while simultaneously shifting the culture of the clinic toward people-centered care through participatory service design. We conclude with research directions to leverage the potential of service design for healthcare innovation, including strengthening the dialogue between explanatory and design research, exploring new multidisciplinary collaborations and integrating multiple research methods.