Designing Collaborative Culture in Healthcare

Collaboration is the recognition of stakeholders and an ability, a decision-making process, that aligns these stakeholders within a system. However, in a highly complex risk-averse environment like a healthcare system, the limited scope of error can burden agency and cultural competence of key actors of this system. This design research project looks into healthcare organizations with an objective of nurturing a collaborative culture of innovation.

TEAM

A team of 8 design management students and a service design student collaborated with a prominent healthcare organization, their innovation department specifically, who served as subject matter experts for the purpose of this research.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The apparatus for this research, our methodology, included an intensive analysis of academic literature on collaboration and culture of innovation along with primary research methods like conducting in-depth interviews and observations at three healthcare facilities. The data from desk research was placed next to qualitative primary research data to establish disjunctures following which it was clubbed together in an attempt to synthesize information. This synthesis was performed using the process of affinitization to produce insights.

INSIGHTS

Resulting insights from our primary research were given a hierarchical structure in the form of an interactive opportunity map. Divided into 8 opportunity areas and 4 hierarchical stages, this map is carefully designed on the basis of how each area interacted with the other(s). Each area, once interacted with, reveals a number of opportunities. However, all opportunities do not fall into the clear boundaries of their respective areas, some of them are fluid enough to overlap with other areas as well. In an attempt to simplify this complexity, color-coding was used as a devise. An opportunity with two or more colors represents its place in the areas corresponding to its colors.

Additionally, we adopted Harward Business Review’s 4 different cores (Connnection, Communication, Capability and Coordination) that are essential to collaboration to construct another framework, a map of sorts. We call it the 4 C’s framework. The framework itself is concentric with each quarter representing a core element of collaboration. This framework is used to identify inter-departmental gaps in a collaborative system. The idea of this framework was for it to be used in conjunction with the opportunity map to recognize what and where the system lacks.

DELIVERABLES

Not completely satisfied with our frameworks, we pushed ourselves to design an activity to go with the frameworks for key stakeholders to address the gaps and opportunities in their collaborative system. By creating archetypes for different departments in a healthcare system and putting them on a card deck, we imagine this exercise being conducted in synchrony with our two frameworks. These archetype cards, together with the opportunity map, can help stakeholders create scenarios which they think are appropriate for that scenario, and generate insights for developing future strategies, thereby filling the gaps of the 4C’s framework one after the other. Conducting this activity itself would address breaking down of silos by bringing different departments to the same table. This deliverable was user tested with our subject matter experts during final delivery.