Design principles for cultivating a creative mindset in medicine

Can hospitalists think like designers?

“…In this issue, we present a series of perspectives on the theme of design and its growing implications to healthcare. [3][4][5][6] The goal of this series is to provide hospitalists with an introductory framework to some of the processes, tools, and guiding principles of human-centered design as well as share concrete examples of design's impact in healthcare, such as the design of hospital environments for patient safety, 5 humancentered healthcare interactions, 3,6 and development of more empathetic and creative clinicians 4 to support efforts in healthcare innovation.…”

“…Finally, the design lends itself best to "wicked problems" in healthcare where problems are less defined and the designer's task is to define those conditions precisely and formulate a viable solution. 4,7 In medicine, we rely on approaches such as quality improvement, where oftentimes we either know what works and are trying to optimize the process in a new environment or in research where we have an idea for what we would like to investigate and test (see Figure 1). But how might we approach these complex "wicked" problems in healthcare where there may be more unknowns left to be discovered?…”