The importance of user-centred design in healthcare

Patient needs, medical technology, and the healthcare landscape are evolving rapidly. The focus on how we change and transform is at an all-time high.  

And this does not come without its challenges. 

The main challenge for most organisations is first doing groundwork to ready itself for change. Both in terms of its people, landscape and it’s processes. 

In my experience delivering healthcare transformations in Wales, user-centred design is fast becoming a crucial part of unlocking meaningful, transformative changes. It benefits healthcare practitioners, back office teams and, most importantly, patients.  

In this blog post, I’ll explore the key principles of user-centred design and how they can be applied to drive successful healthcare transformations, using practical applications from Perago’s latest project with Velindre Cancer Centre as an example. 

What is User-Centred Design?  

User-Centred Design is a design approach that focuses on understanding and addressing the needs, behaviours, and preferences of the end users at every stage of the design and development process. It plays an important role inlaying the groundwork to create products, services, or systems that are highly usable and provide a positive user experience.  

 What are the key principles of User-Centred Design?   

• Understand Users’ Needs: The process begins with researching and understanding the target users, their goals, context, and challenges. This can be done through workshops, interviews, surveys, observations, and personas.  In this project this was done through workshops where we went on site at Velindre made it an interactive session with the various user groups of their new Electronic Prescribing (EPMA) system implementation. It worked well as we were able to collect what we would have usually captured via surveys, interviews, and other methods in one interactive workshop. It was great for sense checking with each other, providing a little challenge which opened the conversation up and got some great anecdotal feedback to be feed into this discovery.  
   
• Involve Users in Design: Users are actively involved throughout the design process. Designers seek feedback from potential users through usability testing, prototyping, and co-creation sessions.  For Velindre’s Electronic Prescribing workshops, we involved many users from three main disciplines, Medics who would use the system for mainly writing prescriptions, Pharmacists in dispensing the medication would use it, and nurses who would use the system daily for various purposes when on ward. We also included representation from their patient engagement team to represent the patient, as ultimately they would be the most important ‘User’.  
   
• Iterative Process: UCD is an iterative process where prototypes and designs are tested and refined based on user feedback. This ensures continuous improvement and alignment with user needs.  For Velindre we even conducted the workshops iteratively, where the outputs of the first workshop with a user group were used in subsequent workshops so that other disciplines could validate what was being said, challenge it and provide anecdotal insights to the discovery. When Velindre onboarded a supplier and got ready for EPMA we stressed the importance of keeping this iterative approach in mind as business and Healthcare landscapes change frequently, and so will user needs.
• Focus on Usability: The design should prioritise ease of use, efficiency, and accessibility. Interfaces, workflows, and interactions should be intuitive and require minimal effort to navigate. There is no doubt that usability plays a cefor this EPMA system for Velindre, which is why we created 5 problem statements with each of the 3 disciplines on different scenarios which brought out so many different scenarios and with that, different needs to be factored into discovery. 
   
• Holistic Experience: UCD considers the entire user journey, ensuring that each touchpoint, from the first interaction to ongoing use, is optimised for the best user experience. This was key for the EPMA discovery, as prescribing is only successful when a patient received their medication. But getting there in real-world application isn’t straight forward, so we geared up the workshops and problem statements to bring this into light. We scoped out the worst-case scenario which is a missing drugs chart and the patient is expecting to go home at 5pm and they live in rural Wales and would take the bus. Although this scenario would be a rarity, it was important to have that Holistic Experience view for the patient, this scenario also included all 3 of the different disciplines, medic who prescribed, Pharmacists who need to dispense, and Nurses providing that on ward care. Each touchpoint was carefully considered, and what that would mean for EPMA and what the system would need to do for Velindre and its patients.   

In the next blog, I’ll be reflecting on the different stages of Healthcare Transformation and how User-Centred Design helped deliver a successful electronic prescribing transformation for Velindre.