IDEO – The Health Care Blog

Could the ‘Design Thinking’ that Led to the Apple Mouse Transform Health Care?

Nov 6, 2014• 10

By SHANTANU NUNDY

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In 1980, Apple gave a small California design firm (that later became IDEO) a simple yet incredibly complex task: do more with less. The challenge: take a computer mouse that cost $400 and make one that cost $25 while simultaneously improving the quality, functionality and user experience. The result: IDEO not only delivered an exceptional product, but also pioneered a design thinking approach that has allowed it to make innovation a regular occurrence.

This month, as part of the first Evolent Health Clinical Innovation Summit on high-value health care delivery, we visited IDEO at its Palo Alto headquarters. Twenty health care leaders from across the country visited the IDEO toy lab, heard the story of the first Apple mouse and marveled at a 3D-printer. The question on our collective minds: could the design thinking principles that produced the first Apple mouse be used to transform U.S. health care?Continue reading…

IDEO and Ix Innovation Design

Jul 31, 2009• 3

By ARNA IONESCU

Next week Matthew will be in a workshop with the folks from design firm IDEO and our friends from the Ix Center. In preparation we’re posting this article from IDEO’s Arna Ionescu who was at the recent joint Health 2.0 Meets Ix Conference on a panel moderated by the Center for Information Therapy’s President Josh Seidman. And if that wasn’t all incestuous enough, this post was originally on Josh’s blog over at Ix.

Thank you to those of you who participated in our interactive webinar last Tuesday. During the webinar we used IDEO’s design approach to tackle the challenge of providing effective Information Therapy (Ix) to a fictional character named Vernon, who has minimal resources and was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure.

To inspire solutions for this challenge, members of the IxAction
Alliance submitted images of unexpected learning moments in their daily
lives. These images spanned from public service billboards to Snapple
caps and restaurant placemats. In advance of the webinar, the IDEO team
synthesized the images into brainstorm questions.

The webinar attendees voted and selected the brainstorm question,
“How Might We leverage curiosity to prompt Vernon to engage with Ix?”
Following IDEO’s brainstorm rules attendees submitted ideas using the webinar software.

More than 30 ideas were generated in the ten minute brainstorm, and
a second vote allowed the attendees to select which idea to pursue
further. Attendees selected the “High Blood Pressure Club.” We
discussed “$10, 10 minute prototypes” – an approach that allows us to
try out fast and cheap experiments to gain insight before costly design
and implementation efforts.