5.4. IDEO's Work with the Mayo Clinic

IDEO, a renowned design consultancy, is actively working with Design Thinking methodology with the Mayo Clinic to improve the patient experience in healthcare. The Center for Innovation (CFI) was created by the Mayo Clinic in 2008 as a bridge between design thinking and the practice of medicine, specifically within their own facilities. CFI was imagined as a space where the teams could conduct observations and research interviews with patients, family members, and users. They also planned to work with visualization, modeling, prototyping, and testing of possible solutions for the provision of health services.

Empathizing: To empathize with the users, namely patients, healthcare providers, administrators, and other stakeholders, activities were carried out to reach a deep understanding of their needs, motivations, and experiences. IDEO and the Mayo Clinic conducted interviews, observations, and immersion sessions to empathize with the challenges and opportunities within the healthcare system.

Re-defining to understand: This step involved reframing the challenge to reflect a human-centered perspective that could identify opportunities for innovation in the healthcare services. The Mayo Clinic’s history of innovation in care delivery, starting with the invention of the patient medical record in the early 20th century, demonstrates over a century dedicated to finding ways to improve both patient outcomes and the health care experience.

Ideating and prototyping: Divergent thinking is the key for the fusion of design thinking with the medical practice at the Mayo Clinic. Although the complete process is not publicly available, four concrete examples follow:

i) Redesigning Patient Waiting Areas to improve the experience for patients and their families while waiting for appointments or procedures. The process could aim for more comfortable and engaging spaces that are conducive to relaxation or productive use of time.

ii) Redesigning the appointment scheduling process to make it more convenient and efficient for both patients and healthcare providers. Ideas could improve on user-friendly digital platforms, which are widely spread across the healthcare sector worldwide.

iii) Enhancing Telemedicine platforms for remote consultations would involve improving the user interface, integrating virtual waiting rooms, and ensuring seamless communication amongst patients and healthcare providers.

iv) Improving Patient Education Materials would mean making this literature more engaging, accessible, and culturally sensitive.

Evaluating and Implementing: The Center for Innovation at the Mayo Clinic has implemented a structured approach to prototype solutions and turns them into more refined products through a very specific protocol that develops potential solutions into more concrete products. This protocol ensures that every idea deemed worthy is being developed to its fullest. Note also that many innovations are small changes, like the refinement or enhancement of an existing medical device or procedure, where the surgeons, doctors, and nurses are impacted directly by the enhanced usability and effectiveness of the instrument.

Further reading:

Discussion questions related to IDEO’s work with the Mayo Clinic

  1. If you wanted to follow the collaborative steps to empathize with various stakeholders within the healthcare system, including patients, healthcare providers, and administrators, how would you conduct these activities?
  2. How did IDEO team up with the Mayo Clinic to make waiting rooms more chill and appointment scheduling less of a hassle?
  3. What advantages can you identify in this type of collaboration, between a health service provider and a California-based global design and consulting firm known for collaborating with Stanford University to create d.school for design thinking?
  4. IDEO uses a sequence of slogans on their site. Consider the impact of these actions and how you could incorporate them into your own practice: We build to think. We listen to unlock. We play to discover. We question to create. We inspire to provoke.
  5. What inspired ideas did they come up with to make telemedicine easier to use for both patients and doctors?
  6. How did the Mayo Clinic make sure their patient education materials were actually helpful?
  7. What role do small innovations play in the overall improvement of healthcare services, particularly in terms of usability and effectiveness of medical devices or procedures?
  8. How have they ensured that the solutions developed through their collaboration are sustainable? What innovative solutions can you imagine to improve the patient experience in healthcare? Explore the impact of better waiting rooms, appointment scheduling, telemedicine platforms, and patient education materials.
  9. How did IDEO and the Mayo Clinic ensure that patient education materials were not only accessible and engaging but also culturally sensitive, and what impact did these materials have on enhancing health literacy and improving patient outcomes?
  10. Explore how culturally-sensitive patient education materials can contribute to improving health literacy and patient outcomes.