Shobha Dasari
In November of her freshman year, Shobha Dasari ‘23 joined the Book Creators course from the Creator Institute, founded by Professor Eric Koester from Georgetown University, with the goal of writing a book. But she wasn’t sure of her topic. Then in her winter quarter, Dasari took a course called Inventing the Future, in which she learned about the concepts of human-centered design and futurism — creating the future. Thinking about these ideas, Dasari was inspired to write about the intersection of design and healthcare.
“[Hacking Healthcare is about] how we can design technology and healthcare so that it actually is impactful, solves people's needs in a way that helps them and doesn't create more problems,” Dasari said. “Healthcare is super complicated and very resistant to change, especially technological change, and so I'm basically exploring the stories of how a lot of different innovators in healthcare have been able to overcome that and create products and companies around those products that are actually making a difference in people's lives.”
Before writing “Hacking Healthcare,” Dasari didn’t even know a career in product design for healthcare existed. As she interviewed industry professionals and documented their stories, Dasari became committed to working in the field. Dasari has joined a couple healthcare oriented clubs at Stanford like Stanford Health Innovations in Future Technologies (SHIFT). In the future, she wants to design technology to combat medical nonadherence, when patients don’t take their medications as prescribed.
Throughout her interviews, Dasari honed in on one aspect of human-centered design: empathy. To her, empathy is essential to human-centered design, since designers are using empathy to learn about the physical need they’re trying to solve.
“Based on what you learn, you're able to design something that actually helps people in the intended way,” Dasari said. “You're first validating that what you're solving is an actual problem people have, and you're making sure that how you're solving it is the way that the ultimate users of your solution want it to be solved. It's much more complicated than that in the real world — super easy to say, very hard to do.”
“[Hacking Healthcare is about] how we can design technology and healthcare so that it actually is impactful, solves people's needs in a way that helps them and doesn't create more problems,” Dasari said. “Healthcare is super complicated and very resistant to change, especially technological change, and so I'm basically exploring the stories of how a lot of different innovators in healthcare have been able to overcome that and create products and companies around those products that are actually making a difference in people's lives.”
Before writing “Hacking Healthcare,” Dasari didn’t even know a career in product design for healthcare existed. As she interviewed industry professionals and documented their stories, Dasari became committed to working in the field. Dasari has joined a couple healthcare oriented clubs at Stanford like Stanford Health Innovations in Future Technologies (SHIFT). In the future, she wants to design technology to combat medical nonadherence, when patients don’t take their medications as prescribed.
Throughout her interviews, Dasari honed in on one aspect of human-centered design: empathy. To her, empathy is essential to human-centered design, since designers are using empathy to learn about the physical need they’re trying to solve.
“Based on what you learn, you're able to design something that actually helps people in the intended way,” Dasari said. “You're first validating that what you're solving is an actual problem people have, and you're making sure that how you're solving it is the way that the ultimate users of your solution want it to be solved. It's much more complicated than that in the real world — super easy to say, very hard to do.”
Listen
|
to an excerpt from Chapter 3 of “Hacking Healthcare,” titled “HealthCARE”:
|
It was supposed to be one of the best days in Doug Dietz’s professional career.
But when Dietz, an industrial engineer at General Electric, told this story during a TEDx Talk in San Jose, he claimed that he “had basically failed at [his] job."
His team had finished designing a high-tech magnetic resonance (MR) scanner that they had been working on for the last two years, and Dietz had been given the opportunity to see the first product installed in its actual environment, at the University of Pittsburgh hospital.
Dietz was very proud to see his machine in the hospital setting. In his TEDx Talk, he described this vividly: “I was so excited to see the first machine, I was just running through the hospital to check out my new product. I barged in and took out my wallet and all the metal stuff out of my pockets. I was with my baby, and I was just a proud papa.”
A short time after he had entered the MR scanner room, the technologist asked Dietz to leave, since there would be a patient coming through. As Dietz stepped into the hallway, he saw a young girl— the patient— and her family walking toward the scanner room. The girl was weeping and shaking uncontrollably. The technologist immediately called for an anesthesiologist to sedate the girl so that the MR scan could proceed.
When Dietz turned to look back at his MR scanner, he didn’t see the shiny, new technological marvel he had obsessed about minutes ago. He began to see the room through the girl’s eyes, framed by flickering fluorescent lights, a huge warning sticker on the wall, and the black and yellow caution tape around the room. And the machine, as Dietz put it, “basically looked like a brick with a hole in it.”
MR scans, and other types of medical imaging procedures, are almost always unpleasant experiences for children and their families. And sedation isn’t uncommon— in the field of nuclear medicine, almost 80% of children need to be sedated in order for them to stay still enough for a good image.
It was clear to Dietz that he needed to fix his MR scanner to look less intimidating for children, and he took the responsibility upon himself to change it. To learn more about the issue, he started from the source: children and their parents. He held brainstorming sessions with children at local daycares to learn more about their development stages and their vivid imaginations. He took children into MR scanner rooms and asked them to point out everything in the room that scared them. He shadowed a few parents taking their children to an MR scan. Dietz learned that for many of these parents, their biggest fear was not whether the scan results would diagnose their children or whether insurance would cover their medical costs like Dietz had initially thought. In fact, these parents’ number one fear was how they were going to get their child through the process.
But when Dietz, an industrial engineer at General Electric, told this story during a TEDx Talk in San Jose, he claimed that he “had basically failed at [his] job."
His team had finished designing a high-tech magnetic resonance (MR) scanner that they had been working on for the last two years, and Dietz had been given the opportunity to see the first product installed in its actual environment, at the University of Pittsburgh hospital.
Dietz was very proud to see his machine in the hospital setting. In his TEDx Talk, he described this vividly: “I was so excited to see the first machine, I was just running through the hospital to check out my new product. I barged in and took out my wallet and all the metal stuff out of my pockets. I was with my baby, and I was just a proud papa.”
A short time after he had entered the MR scanner room, the technologist asked Dietz to leave, since there would be a patient coming through. As Dietz stepped into the hallway, he saw a young girl— the patient— and her family walking toward the scanner room. The girl was weeping and shaking uncontrollably. The technologist immediately called for an anesthesiologist to sedate the girl so that the MR scan could proceed.
When Dietz turned to look back at his MR scanner, he didn’t see the shiny, new technological marvel he had obsessed about minutes ago. He began to see the room through the girl’s eyes, framed by flickering fluorescent lights, a huge warning sticker on the wall, and the black and yellow caution tape around the room. And the machine, as Dietz put it, “basically looked like a brick with a hole in it.”
MR scans, and other types of medical imaging procedures, are almost always unpleasant experiences for children and their families. And sedation isn’t uncommon— in the field of nuclear medicine, almost 80% of children need to be sedated in order for them to stay still enough for a good image.
It was clear to Dietz that he needed to fix his MR scanner to look less intimidating for children, and he took the responsibility upon himself to change it. To learn more about the issue, he started from the source: children and their parents. He held brainstorming sessions with children at local daycares to learn more about their development stages and their vivid imaginations. He took children into MR scanner rooms and asked them to point out everything in the room that scared them. He shadowed a few parents taking their children to an MR scan. Dietz learned that for many of these parents, their biggest fear was not whether the scan results would diagnose their children or whether insurance would cover their medical costs like Dietz had initially thought. In fact, these parents’ number one fear was how they were going to get their child through the process.