Design thinking during a health emergency: building a national data collection and reporting system

Abstract

Background Design thinking allows challenging problems to be redefined in order to identify alternative user-center strategies and solutions. To address the many challenges associated with collecting and reporting data during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, we used a design thinking approach to build the Global Ebola Laboratory Data collection and reporting system. Main text We used the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. This approach offers a flexible model which focuses on empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. A strong focus of the methodology includes end-users’ feedback from the beginning to the end of the process. This is an iterative methodology that continues to adapt according to the needs of the system. The stages do not need to be sequential and can be run in parallel, out of order, and repeated as necessary. Design thinking was used to develop a data collection and reporting system, which contains all laboratory data from the three countries during one of the most complicated multi-country outbreaks to date. The data collection and reporting system was used to orient the response interventions at the district, national, and international levels within the three countries including generating situation reports, monitoring the epidemiological and operational situations, providing forecasts of the epidemic, and supporting Ebola-related research and the Ebola National Survivors programs within each country. Conclusions Our study demonstrates the numerous benefits that arise when using a design thinking methodology during an outbreak to solve acute challenges within the national health information system and the authors recommend it’s use during future complex outbreaks.

Indirect Effects of Ebola Virus Disease Epidemics on Health Systems in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia: A Scoping Review Supplemented with Expert Interviews

“…Positive indirect effects in terms of several initiatives to support or strengthen the HISs as a whole were taken during the EVD epidemics [ 70 , 83 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 ]. For example, an expert in the DRC even stated that “ there was the development of the ‘DHIS2 tracker’, which can be used during emergencies to track contacts, carry out analyses in a short time, produce reports that are of great value and share them at the time to allow decision-makers to provide or propose solutions to the situation, and the creation of ‘Emergency Operations Centres in Kinshasa, Equateur, Beni, and Butembo ” [ INT 02 ].…”

Teaching Philosophy in a Teaching Portfolio: Domain Knowledge and Guidance

“…Of the 21st century skills, innovative/design thinking assists with starting new projects and revisiting a project that has poor performance. 98,99 The five stages of design thinking or innovation, according to Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (known as the d.school), are (i) empathize (research the needs of the users), (ii) define (state the needs and problems of the users), (iii) ideate (critique assumptions and create new ideas), (iv) prototype (create solutions), and (v) test (try out the solutions and refine them). 100 Critical thinking is needed for knowledge construction, and involves performing learning activities that require the student to interpret, synthesize, evaluate, and/or analyse (i-SEA) an idea or information.…”

Data collection and sharing for pathogen surveillance: Making sense of a fragmented global system

“…From the sources reviewed, at least six report challenges around standardisation. Differences in data collection methods create difficulties comparing data across regions and countries [6,9,11,13,15,20,27,28], which limits how data from separate initiatives can be collated to understand global trends. For example, efforts to monitor invasive pneumococcal disease in Australia differ between regions in terms of whether electronic health records are available and used for surveillance and whether data on vaccine history is collected, which makes it difficult to use data to inform vaccine strategies nationally [9].…”

“…Good platforms also tend to be intuitive to use, and are customisable depending on what parameters users would like to explore [40]. Descriptions of these tools tended to focus on ease-of-use, internet accessibility [2,5,15,42], searchability, flexibility and real-time access to data [20].…”