Designing for Health

The US healthcare system...well, it could use some help. Some aspects work well—taking care of very sick people with insurance—but other parts are very bad—healthcare access for the poor, equitable outcomes, chronic disease management, and medical bankruptcy. The system is difficult to use, and people typically only engage when something is wrong with them. Care providers and patients mostly agree that the healthcare experience is terrible, even when outcomes are good. Clinicians also face a merry-go-round of never-ending paperwork and moral hazards. On top of it all, the broader care ecosystem has emerged by necessity, but was not designed with the people giving or receiving care in mind.

There is no ecosystem-wide solution, but we can build something better from the bottom up. That journey starts with a human-centered approach to managing health, preventing disease, and treating illness. The principles in this book are a way of thinking about designing processes, workflows, operations, and technologies around the person-to-person interaction that is the heart of healthcare. They lay the foundation for creating more effective and equitable healthcare, improving experiences, and engaging patients and doctors in a vision of health as a lifelong endeavor.