BOSTON – The shift toward population health management is going to require changes of existential proportion. Perhaps chief among those: design and user experience.

Unlike other industries, much of healthcare design decisions are made in board rooms, at architect’s desks, during conferences – rather than where clinicians and patients live and work, said Todd Dunn, director of innovation at Intermountain Healthcare. 

Take the common doctor’s office, where a clinician sits on a stool – not facing the patient – and enters notes into a PC. Whether that physician is actually listening to the patient, the natural perception is that he or she is not.

Dunn pointed to companies including Ikea, Legos, Oxo, Procter & Gamble as examples of achieving better user experience by conducting observational studies.

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Ikea, for instance, will pay customers to allow company representatives to come into their homes and watch them assemble and arrange furniture. P&G, for its part, will pay to come and take a shower with you (wearing swimsuits!) or watch you clean windows.

The Lego Group studies how children play with their blocks, which Dunn said was more about understanding unstructured time than building. And Oxo went into the kitchen of real people, with user cereal bowls sitting around, dogs running through, a working mess.

"If it’s important enough for furniture, Legos, cleaning products and kitchen tools, then why aren’t we doing this in healthcare?" Dunn asked. "I think we can."

Shafiq Rab, MD, echoed that sentiment. The CIO of Hackensack University Medical Center said it requires a holistic approach beyond merely telling patients what to do.

"We have to understand the entire community we serve and the environment associated with it," Rab said.

Carolinas HealthCare medical director of primary care innovation and proactive Health Gregory Weidner, MD, added that population health has to mean something to the lives we’re trying to help: "Population health is about people not patients," he said.

"Whatever we do, pop health, patient engagement, care coordination, at the end is a group of people trying to live their lives, become and stay healthy, interact with the healthcare system."

Toward that end, Dunn said that Intermountain established the Design for People program to better understand the patient experience. Design for People is based on three tenets: empathy, curiosity, and rapid experiments. 

Dunn pointed to home care as an example. Without going into the context of where caregivers and patients interact, and run observational studies there, hospitals cannot truly understand what that experience is like and how to improve upon it.

The transformation toward population health management is underway, though it will happen slowly enough that Dunn called it an existential problem that the industry will face for the next few years.

"Population health is turning the tide to make things work the way people want them to work outside the system," Dunn said. But the industry is going to have to "design solutions that delight people and make this go the way it should."

Twitter: @SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com

This article is part of our reporting on the Healthcare IT News Pop Health Forum 2016. Other stories in this package include The essence of population health? Design and user experience, Population health management views from the frontline, and Geisinger CEO David Feinberg calls for 'The Year of the Patient'.