Understanding Design Thinking

So, what exactly is design thinking? Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO, an
innovations company that aims to make an impact through design, defines design
thinking as, A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the
designers toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology,
and the requirements for business success.

Hartmann agrees, adding, When designers approach a problem, the primary and
most important consideration is always the end user. For pharma, design thinking
means using design to drive ideas to better connect with and serve patient
experience. Given the current demand for more patient-centered products and
services, design thinking can be viewed as a core competence that can set a
pharma company apart from the rest.
Pharma can adopt design thinking to provide clear and simple experiences that
really get to the heart of patients, without having the need to hassle or overwhelm
them with medical information, procedures and jargon.

Basic steps of design thinking:

Design thinking is highly flexible, but far from disorganized. Indeed, design thinking
can appear to be a simultaneous assortment of events because it is highly iterative
and primed for immediate adjustments. The basic steps are empathizing, defining,
ideating, prototyping, and testing.
first step of empathizing, Petroff says, Empathy is always based on the end
user, so understanding the lives of people who take certain drugs and treatment
these populations should be researched.
The second step, defining, refers to the identification of the problem, while
ideating is brainstorming alternative solutions to that problem. According to Petroff,
Design thinking is mostly about problem framing. There is a part of it that
generates ideas and narrows those down to a set of concepts to develop. For
pharma, I think it would be most useful for helping stakeholders define what
problem they are trying to solve before resources are allocated to solving the
problem.

Hartmann explains these two steps as the stages of constant questioning. We

should seek to answer questions related to the patient and their context. The
questions will always reveal opportunity areas, and often with big potential for
improvements, she explains.
For defining, Hartmann suggests asking, What pain points do patients with a
particular illnesses deal with when visiting their doctor, picking up their prescription
or taking their medication? How is their relationship with their doctor? What causes
them to miss a dose or not follow the doctors instructions? Who do they trust for
information?
Third Step, For ideating, Hartmann asks, What can we create or improve to
ensure that medication is taken correctly and therefore works better? Can we,
somehow, influence the patient to change their lifestyle to improve the effect of the
drugs? What else can we do to help the patient to live a better life?
In addition to asking several questions, visualization tools must also be developed
to help stakeholders comprehend the situation. Design artifacts such as mind
maps, patient journeys, and diagrams, can be put together to provide a physical
representation to help stakeholders grasp the problem and its potential solutions.
According to Hartmann, Designers visualize both to communicate the current
situation, as well as to envision what it could look like in the future. Concrete
visualizations allow us to create a common understanding of how the patient
experience looks today, and then to work collaboratively with healthcare providers
and pharmaceutical companies to create the ideal experience.
The final two steps of design thinking, prototyping and testing, go hand-in-hand
by ensuring that an idea doesnt simply stay as an abstract and unused idea.
Whereas design artifacts represent the problem, prototypes represent the chosen
solution. Testing then involves transparent experimentation so that pharma can
immediately see and assess the solutions real-world feasibility.
Examples of design thinking in pharma include GE Healthcares SensorySuite, a
mammography exam machine that distracts patients from feelings of anxiety and
discomfort. This innovation was driven by research showing that one out of four
women avoid having a mammography due to fear of the procedure.

Many companies are using innovative design to improve self-management

experience for patients. Bayer Diabetes Care, for example, partnered with IDEO
to develop the design, interface, and on-the-shelf packaging for a self-management
gadget called the Contour USB Blood Glucose Monitor. On one end, it is a rod that
touches and measures blood, and on the other end it is a USB, which can provide a
blood sugar levels summary using GE software.

Novo Nordisk has developed several solutions that enable diabetes patients to
take their medication in a less scary way with a device looking more like a pen than
a needle. In collaboration with Smart Design and OXO, UCB also created Cimzia,
which rethinks the self-injection process for arthritis patients.
Design thinking is also used to detect and solve experiential problems throughout
healthcare programs. the experience of breast cancer patients by reducing their
waiting time between learning of their lump and getting a specialists formal
diagnosis.
From empathy, pharma can define and ideate - identify the problems that must be
addressed within organizations and brainstorm for possible solutions. To ensure that
ideas gain traction, are brought to life, and are communicated to healthcare
providers, pharma then needs to prototype and test