The first Healthcare Experience Design conference, a one-day symposium held in Boston April 11, sold out with nearly 300 participants across all sectors and industries.  The program selected leading speakers and designers in four tracks of presentations:

• Patient-Centric Design
• Designing for Care: Provider Interfaces and Care Environments
• Facilitating Engagement
• New Models for Healthcare Delivery

See all presentations and speakers

In Experience Design as Creative Care I raised these issues:

• We (designers) are a new role in health institutions, and have a high credibility hurdle.
• Earning trust takes time. Designers are still inexperienced in critical domain knowledge.
• Our skills are tactical & not clinical (and not strategic, even if we think so.)  That will take time to change. We need to develop strong design research portfolios.
• Our user-centered language is often irrelevant to doctors. (And who’s a “user” in healthcare?)
• Always think: “How does (my) design help patients?”

What is Design for Care about?

• Targeting design interventions to whole systems and services, not products and interfaces.
• If the aim is improving patient experience and performance at the point of care, we need to rethink the service design and care flows for practitioners.
• Think (IBM) service systems. Not users.
• Designers need to patiently develop a shared language understood and effective in healthcare.
• We (UX) need to start sharing design research & practices across sectors, centers, locations