Design Thinking in Health Care

PEER REVIEWED

Figure 1 shows the primary stages of Design Thinking and exercises used or questions asked in each stage. The first stage is Needfinding, where observations and questioning are used to understand both the user and the challenge. The second stage is Ideation, where as many solutions to the challenge are generated as possible. This is followed by Protoyping, or building a minimally viable representation of the best solutions, and Testing, where you get user feedback and use this to further refine the solution. These stages are dynamic and can be completed multiple times as the solution is iterated. The final stage is implementing, where the refined solution is tested, change is assessed, and scaling is considered. This may lead to additional Needfinding and continuation of the process.

Figure 1.
Design Thinking process, stages of design thinking and examples of exercises used and questions asked in each stage, systematic review on Design Thinking in health care, search results through March 31, 2017.

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A total of 1,985 articles were identified through database searching, and 15 were identified through additional sources; 1,203 were retained after duplicates were removed. Abstracts of these 1,203 records were screened, and 906 were removed because they did not meet eligibility criteria, leaving 297 articles for full-text review. After the full-text review, another 275 articles were excluded because they did not meet the eligibility criteria. Twenty-six articles representing 24 unique interventions were included in the review.

Figure 2.
PRISMA 2009 flow diagram, systematic review on Design Thinking in health care, search results through March 31, 2017.

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