Background:  The rapidly changing and increasingly complex hospitalist work environment has placed new focus on provider burnout and resilience. As hospitalist leaders seek tools to address these issues, the design thinking process offers a novel user-centered approach. Initially developed in the tech industry, design thinking moves quickly and iteratively through five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and [...]

Background: In 2014, UCLA Health embarked on a journey to train and inspire the future generation of medicine. The Healthcare Improvement & iNnovation in Quality (THINQ) Collaborative aims to radically shape care delivery by building transformative interdisciplinary platforms to catalyze and nurture innovation at UCLA that lead to large-scale impact. Further, THINQ aspires to engage [...]

Background: Practical and financial pressures have placed a renewed focus on improving the human experience of healthcare from both the patient and provider perspective. Despite this, aligning patients and interdisciplinary providers around meaningful experience improvement in the inpatient setting remains elusive. We sought to develop an innovative interdisciplinary design process for experience improvement on a [...]

Background: Design thinking is a framework for creative problem solving. When the design thinking process (often leveraged in fields outside of healthcare delivery) is applied, it leads to a human-centered path to innovation. The infusion of deep empathy, holistic examination, inclusive collaboration, and effective iteration fosters sustainable solutions for complex human concerns. In traditional problem-solving, [...]

Background: The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a post-discharge survey which captures patient experience during and after hospitalization (1). Previous studies have demonstrated that high quality discharge communication is vital for patient safety, with poor communication leading to decreased medication adherence, unplanned readmissions, and poorer health outcomes—important implications for both [...]

Background: Hospitalization can be overwhelming for patients. Diagnostic uncertainty is common, and patients interact with many professionals who present information that may seem confusing. We bring a design thinking perspective to creating more patient-responsive hospital care, allowing their stories to drive the creation of a human-centered experience. Design thinking is about understanding needs and generating [...]

Background: Quality Improvement (QI) is a methodology for solving complex systems problems, and QI methods have been adapted from industry and spread widely across healthcare over the past two decades. QI methods are particularly well-suited for examining clinical processes for effectiveness, reliability, and efficiency. However, Design Thinking (DT) is a problem solving methodology that applies [...]

Background: Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) often face frequent emergency department (ED) visits and hospital readmissions, primarily driven by challenges in pain management, stigma, and system-level barriers. Existing interventions at the CU Division of Hospital Medicine, such as cohorting patients with specific teams, multidisciplinary care conferences, and implementing care plans for high-utilizer patients, have [...]