Redesigning healthcare to fit with people

Design expertise can improve delivery of care Healthcare expenditures vary fourfold across the globe, from less than 5% to nearly 20% of a nation’s gross domestic product.1 Higher levels of spending, however, have not necessarily produced better results, suggesting that some healthcare systems are more efficient than others.2 These observations have led to various efforts to improve the efficiency of care systems. In Europe and the US, for example, emphasis is increasingly shifting away from the “volume” of care (number of services) to the “value” of care (quality, outcomes, and costs).3 4 Government and other payers are driving health systems to invest in electronic health records, data analytics, performance improvement, and clinical decision support tools. Unfortunately, these investments are often launched as a series of individual fixes targeting different types of apparent underuse, overuse, or misuse of healthcare, disconnected from each other and from workflows in clinical settings. And thus well intentioned reforms are …