WHAT WE DO | Design Thinking
To design clinical experiences that meet patients' needs, Mayo Clinic must understand those needs. The Center for Innovation (CFI) uses a defined methodology to bring discipline and focus to the work of innovation. Housed on the 17th floor of the Gonda and Mayo buildings, the center is like a giant incubator — a space for nurturing new ideas, enabling them to grow, mature and evolve until they are ready for the patient.
The center has developed an in-house lab, the SPARC Design Studio. Not only do we observe patients, interview families, and conduct traditional consumer research, but we also visualize, model, prototype and test possible health care delivery solutions, creating innovations that will transform health care delivery.
Field research helps us understand patient needs so we can improve health care experiences and delivery. The program is much more than redesigning exam rooms and equipping them with new furniture. It's about the process and flow of patient care, how and where patient and caregiver interactions occur, and how to most effectively integrate technology into the patient care experience.
— Barbara Spurrier, Administrative Director, Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation
"Design thinking," originally coined for consumer product design specialists, has been recognized as an essential mental process in accelerating and promoting innovation. Design thinking essentially brings together observation and imagination.
Design thinking is a creative, problem-solving approach that CFI uses to improve consumer health care experience and delivery. The term characterizes a problem-solving approach that goes beyond process analysis or quality improvement. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Tim Brown, CEO of the design consultancy IDEO, said:
"Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity."
These sensibilities could include empathy, creativity, ambidextrous thinking, systems thinking, a human-centered focus, and deep curiosity about the world. Design methods include ethnographic and observational techniques, visualization, prototyping, sketching, storytelling, brainstorming, and so on.
Design thinking is a perfect fit with Mayo's values — a human-centered focus (our patient), curiosity (our research enterprise is one of the largest in medicine), and a culture of teamwork.
Refueling Business Strategy
Design thinking has become a vital tool in fueling business innovations. What is our product? Are we delivering it in a way that makes the consumer feel good about the experience? Are we providing a service that won't become obsolete? Some say that the experience is the product. In health care, design thinking has had a role in creating competition where there previously was none.
Mayo's decision to fuse design principles and the hypothesis-based scientific method is invaluable in helping us uncover the various human needs in the health care environment. It's the complement of design allowing us to think beyond what we normally do and serve as translators for ideas and possibilities.
Take Minute Clinic as an example where consumers can get minor illnesses treated in a convenient location for a published, fixed fee - a new concept. Innovation requires thinking fundamentally about understanding consumer needs - and then developing and delivering innovative solutions to meet those needs.