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QUALITY QUICKIE: Design in HC–IDEO’s take

Famed Palo Alto industrial design firm IDEO is taking on the challenge of designing a more-patient friendly hospital process. Many of the ideas they are talking about are similar to the quality circles that the Japanese used to successfully destroy threaten the US auto industry. Don Berwick has been promoting these ideas in health care for many years, as I posted about here.

The most interesting idea the IDEO team comes up with is rapid prototyping.  They changed many things about the process, did it very quickly, and then observed the results immediately.

    Ordinarily the hospital spends a year or two in committee, create what they think is the perfect team process, and then goes out and tries it and fails. At IDEO we say, "fail early to succeed sooner." So after a half hour bringing into the field, we see how colleagues use it. Then we come back and revise it. So we get rapid prototyping in place. Previously it was death by committee.

On a side note, IDEO made its name in part on its design of the Palm V PDA (on the left in the picture).  What’s not so widely known is that IDEO stole assumed its role in the design process from a smaller design firm (for reasons that were totally unrelated to the design work). The smaller firm had already come up with this design, which IDEO if anything made less attractive in the final product. So it just shows that even the best and brightest amongst us have skeletons in our closets.

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