Empathy in healthcare – In an era marked by the ascendancy of generative artificial intelligence, there’s a growing need to underscore the significance of distinctly human workplace skills, particularly those related to innovation and creativity.
Recognizing this imperative, professors Mark Richman and Lisa Iyeke at Hofstra University have developed an elective course tailored for students specializing in emergency medicine.
This course is designed to impart the principles of human-centered design as applied to healthcare innovation.
Human-centered design, as opposed to a solutions-driven approach, places empathy at its core, directing problem-solving efforts toward addressing people’s needs.
This design methodology necessitates a deep understanding of human requirements and tailoring designs to be responsive to them.
In the context of healthcare, human-centered design entails students gaining insights into the needs of individuals, incorporating these perspectives throughout the design process, and adopting a systems-based approach to address various levels of care.
Healthcare design course empowers students
The course, titled “Innovating Patient Care in the ED” (Emergency Department), is structured around the acquisition of five key skills within the design cycle:
To facilitate effective learning, instructors employ interactive in-class sessions and provide practical experiences at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center’s Emergency Department.
During the course, students collaborate with emergency department patients, healthcare providers, and staff to identify systemic issues.
Over the duration of the program, students embark on healthcare improvement projects rooted in the principles of human-centered design and innovation.
During their practical training, students collect data through stakeholder interviews, creatively visualize their findings, lead brainstorming sessions, create prototypes of products or processes, and develop implementation plans. Following the formulation of these plans, students implement and assess the programs.
For their final examination, students work in groups to apply the first four stages of human-centered design to a new problem and subsequently analyze data from other programs to propose enhancements.
The outcomes of these projects were noteworthy. In the initial cohort, students addressed the shortage of otoscope and ophthalmoscope sets in emergency department rooms. Some sets were not properly wall-mounted or functioning, while others lacked sets entirely.
This created challenges for healthcare providers and staff when caring for patients.
In response, students devised prototypes of mobile carts equipped with location tags, simplifying the process of locating and transporting these devices.
The student-led trial revealed that this innovation resulted in less time wasted searching for carts and a reduction in provider frustration.
This efficiency could potentially save up to 480 hours previously spent searching for devices and enable an additional 162 patients to receive care.
The subsequent cohort focused on streamlining the process in the ED waiting room to gather additional patient information prior to their examination.
This improved the efficiency of collecting vital data at the start of the visit, alleviating the burden on providers and providing patients with a meaningful task during their wait.
This course not only emphasizes the importance of prioritizing human needs and empathy in healthcare innovation but also nurtures students’ creativity and open-mindedness.
Initially, both groups of students harbored different ideas about how to resolve the two identified problems.
The first group initially sought to fix wall-mounted devices more effectively. However, they learned that it was more crucial for providers to have fully functioning devices, even if they needed to search for them.
Similarly, the second group amalgamated various documents, enabling patient screening and reducing an additional workload for providers.
Students in the course also acquired valuable skills in interviewing, emotional assessment, interpretation of nonverbal cues, storytelling, survey creation, and critical thinking.
