Abstract

Abstract: Healthcare services are continuously redesigned to meet a range of complex quality requirements: patient safety; patient experience; efficiency; and clinical effectiveness. People across various disciplines, including operations researchers; systems engineers; ergonomists; and clinicians, use different information sources and methods to design a service to meet different quality requirements. Unlike product design processes where tradeoffs between different design requirements are managed and design activities across disciplines are integrated, healthcare service design activities are very often carried out separately to meet disparate quality requirements. As a first step towards integrating healthcare service design activities, this study classified and compared various methods applied to improve healthcare quality and safety by systematically reviewing published literature. A dozen representative data collection methods were compared in terms of information sources, main purposes and application areas. Five different information sources were identified, including people’s behaviour, people’s opinion, medical records, complaint/incident reports and literature. The objective of this paper is to present the current design activitie in healthcare and discusses how to move towards a more integrated approach to healthcare service design.

Aim: this talk will be presented in mid October at IASDR2009 . Thomas would appreciate your comments and feedback after the seminar.