Integrating Research into the Healthcare Design Process
Patients and families are confronted daily with difficult decisions that impact their future, and caregivers are responding to patient needs in a swiftly changing healthcare system. Designing healthcare environments that address patients’ wellbeing while increasing caregiver efficiency is the goal of good design. Yet successful healthcare design often depends on an in-depth understanding of how people use and experience spaces.
As such, empathetic design is gaining prominence as a way for designers to truly see and experience the healthcare environment as patients see and experience it. Rather than rely exclusively on the trackable data of evidence-based design (EBD), Lean planning, practice-based research, and patient experience strategies, empathetic design relies more on experiential data.
Yet empathetic design isn’t necessarily new; it’s instead evolutionary, as healthcare planners continuously research and implement different strategies to better empathize with the patient. What is new is that digital technology creates a more immersive deep-dive into the patient experience that further informs existing best practices.
For more information, read the complete blog in Healthcare Design Magazine.