Dr Bridget Duffy at Gel 12/11/2009
Dr Bridget Duffy is the former chief experience officer at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States. We love the way she approaches the patient experience. It’s well worth 20 minutes to watch this video, which offers a real example of how user-centred design is influencing what happens in real healthcare settings – and is being adopted and understood by the people who manage services.
It’s interesting for us to see what’s going on in the US, and see what lessons we can learn for healthcare in the UK. Bridget suggests that US healthcare has lost sight of its purpose – ‘to help people heal’. We’re interested in how well NHS services support this.
It’s a problem that we started thinking about at the Nordic Service Design conference – that services are often designed around management hierarchies, not the patient’s experience.
The (US) health system is not designed around the patient. Instead it’s designed to provide technology, and the ‘customer’ is the medical specialist buying the technology, not the patient. We wonder whether it’s similar for the NHS. Is the system (the process, the institution, the hierarchy) designed around efficient medical interventions not patients’ experiences? Is the ‘customer’ the patient, or the government or taxpayer?
Bridget Duffy also spoke again the first Gel Health conference in 2009. Again, her talk is definitely worth watching – you can see it at http://vimeo.com/7669131
If you’re interested in this, then try:
- Earl Bakken’s website (Bridget’s mentor), which includes the Project 2010 report Bridget refers to
- Gel conference website
