Jefferson’s medical school program offers a pathway for hospitals to integrate patient-centered design

One quandary that teaching hospitals in particular face is how to create a pathway to innovation. Although some institutions have approached this challenge by starting a fund to invest in healthcare startups or by joining a syndicate of healthcare organizations that have partnered with a venture capital firm to do the same thing, others have taken a different approach. For medical schools, the question is how best to imbue the next generation of physicians with the skills they need. Some have added entrepreneurship programs. But some institutions are baking design into medical school programs to train the next generation of physicians in human-centered design.

Thomas Jefferson University offers a design thinking program as part of the curriculum at Sidney Kimmel Medical College following its acquisition of Philadelphia University.  JeffDESIGN students produce hands-on design projects as they pursue a medical degree.

Other medical schools are adopting human-centered design programs as well, such as University of Virginia School of Medicine, the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School has the Design Institute for Health, among others. Some are integrating entrepreneurship programs.

The various medical design programs offered through TJU come under the umbrella heading of Medicine + Design. In the spring and fall, the Design Lab runs a program for medical students. So far,  80 students have taken part in the program.

The Health Design Lab at Jefferson has been in development over the past 4 years, in a room that was once “a wasteland of medical equipment” as Bon Ku, the head of the Health Design Lab, describes it. Ku is an emergency medicine physician who serves as the Assistant Dean of Health and Design at Jefferson.  The lab is contained within the bank vault of Philadelphia’s former federal reserve building. The idea is to create a new generation of physicians who not only know how to treat their patients but also solve problems in a thoughtful, creative way.

This summer the Health Design Lab has a couple of cohorts — one a design boot camp to encourage a more creative approach to problem-solving not just at Jefferson but the surrounding community as well. A second program is open to medical students as well as industrial design and engineering students, who focus on developing medical devices that address needs aimed at patients and healthcare professionals at the hospital and beyond.

One design that the hospital is currently evaluating is Circalux, a light for patient rooms that allows nurses and physicians to do their job but without disturbing patients from their sleep any more than necessary. The light is activated by a sensor that can attach to the waist like a beeper.

Helene Dailey, Nurse Manager at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said the issue of waking patients at night was one raised by the nightshift which brought it to the attention of the unit council. The question was how do you balance the need to check on patients with the need to ensure they get enough sleep to recover from their illness. Medical students designed the light so that it could give nurses enough light to carry out their tasks with minimum disruption to patients. She noted that one surprise of the study was that a deaf patient appreciated it. But one little detail that Ku likes to point out about Circalux: it was designed by a student who came to the program as an English major.

“We try to teach positive human-centered design, those principles like prototyping rapidly, empathetic design,” said Ku. “Creativity is the most underappreciated skill in medicine. We need to be as creative as artists and designers.”

Although he emphasized that students need to understand the mechanisms of physiology, he added that they also need to develop problem-solving skills.

A few examples of the designs under development at the lab reflect the diverse needs the program seeks to address.

Alaflex Design is an ergonomically designed bandaging system that was developed by a group of students in the Design Lab last year. It is aimed at patients with hyperhidrosis or excessive sweating. The treatment was inspired by women’s sanitary napkins and is designed to give leak protection and guard against odors.

One project a group of students in the design lab is currently hard at work developing is a unisex urine sample collection device that takes women’s urine trajectory into consideration so that it can reduce mess and contamination. 

“Urine collection hasn’t been updated in years. We’re examining how to adapt the device for both genders,” one student noted. “We also want to develop one that ensures a clean catchment sample because the first bit often has epithelial cell bacteria.”

Another project students are working on is devising a prototype for a speculum fitted with imaging capacity for pelvic exams. It would be used for training, documentation, and patient education. The goal would be to create a device while trying to avoid creating new workflow issues for physicians.

In a phone interview, Jefferson Health CEO Dr. Stephen Klasko noted that a lot of the designs developed under Ku’s watch have focused on solving practical problems. 

“We haven’t done a good job of how humans design and experience the health system,” Klasko said. “The [design] Vault isn’t just some cool thing we came up with.  We want to increase physician empathy and decrease burnout.”

Although it’s a fairly new concept. Jefferson’s integration of design techniques could lead to a new generation of physicians that could bring a more diverse set of backgrounds, experience and skill sets to the practice of medicine. But equally interesting will be how Jefferson and other institutions cultivate and scale the technologies and devices these design labs produce.

Photos: Thomas Jefferson University Photography Services