Healthcare

A RAD New Vision

Most people typically have only brief, sporadic interactions with their healthcare provider for most of their lives. This type of engagement can lead to bad experiences for patients. Medical care can feel like it has unnecessary steps, strained relationships, and a lack of overall continuity. Through an ethnographic design project with Kaiser Permanente (Project name: Reimagining Ambulatory Design or RAD), we developed a vision of ambulatory care that improves continuity by shifting the center of care from KP clinics and hospitals into peoples' activities, relationships, and communities. We called this the vision of Life Integration. MORE

Nurses need patient time

Kaiser Permanente conducted a time and motion study of inpatient nurses and found a concerning statistic: during each 8-hour shift, they spend only 90 minutes actually caring for patients. Working closely with Kaiser, we sought to understand why, explore the implications for nurses' work satisfaction, and re-imagine the systems that keep nurses away from their patients. MORE

HEALTHCARE DISRUPTS ORDINARY LIFE 

People are often managing complex social and logistical worlds when they get sick. They might have a family to feed, pets to take care of, friendships to maintain, and a work life to manage. In this project, we sought to understand how the traditional, facility-based model of healthcare disrupts ordinary life and how we can re-imagine healthcare to reduce such disruptions. MORE