Design thinking in Healthcare is an almost perfectly natural fit. On the front end of Healthcare are the nurses who are naturally empathic. A key approach necessary for successful design thinking. Their role is to intimately understand the needs and take care of the problems of their patients. Their daily approach to problem solving requires them to empathize with patients. This approach fits perfectly with the approach of design thinking in healthcare, which is to understand patients/users/customer needs before looking for solutions. However, often patients can't directly communicate their needs to the nursing staff, so nurses are trained to look for signs and use their intuition to gauge the needs of their patients.

Here is a list of the top 10 examples of the use of design thinking in Healthcare:

1. 4 nursing case studies: describing the use of design thinking in healthcare by Penn Nursing which illustrate how nurses can be really powerful collaborators and generators of solutions within Healthcare. The 4 videos describe the main attributes that nurses bring to the problem solving table.
2. Scanning Facilities: The influence and problems that design thinking can help solve in Healthcare go far wider than nursing. Philips, a leading producer of healthcare equipment such as MRI and CAT scanners have used design thinking to improve the patient experience by reducing the number of scans required and the amount of sedatives that need to be administered to patients during procedures by addressing the anxiety of patients who must go through scanning procedures. Philips have also used design thinking in their healthcare division to build better relationships with their healthcare clients. Over the past 10 years, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital’s managers have  transformed their institution from the usual, grim, human-repair shop into a bright and comforting place by incorporating design thinking and design principles into their planning process.
3. Caring for the aged: Design thinking in healthcare has also produced interesting results for an aged care facility in Australia as you can read in this paper on the creation of sustainability strategies for the facility.
4. Improving Healthcare systems: in a Design thinking project in healthcare in Dubai, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) sought to make it easier for their patients to deal with the logistics of interacting with the healthcare system and found that they didn’t just need help connecting to medical information; they needed help connecting to their loved ones as well.
5. Diagnosis: Design thinking has also been used to improve the treatment and management of diseases such as Diabetes and Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s Association asked used design thinking to respond to the question "how might we diagnose the disease earlier?". In Denmark design thinking was used in the development and testing of a mobile application to support diabetes self-management for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes.
6. Underpinning results with research (a study of 24 projects): The USA Center for Disease Control (CDC) did an extensive study to understand how applying design thinking in healthcare could enhance innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness by increasing focus on patient and provider needs. The objective of this review was to determine how design thinking has been used in health care and whether it is effective. Twenty-four studies using Design Thinking were included across 19 physical health conditions, 2 mental health conditions, and 3 systems processes. Twelve were successful, 11 reported mixed success, and one was not successful. In addition, 4 studies comparing Design Thinking interventions to traditional interventions showed greater satisfaction, usability, and effectiveness.
7. Improving hygiene: In another design thinking in healthcare project, Northwestern University graduates Mert Iseri and Yuri Malina spent weeks observing staff at North Shore University Health System. The challenge is to get staff to wash their hands. Experts agree that simply improving staff  hand-washing habits could prevent needless infections. While hospitals have plenty of communal sinks and hand-sanitizing dispensers, time-strapped caregivers simply don’t use them, and hand washing monitoring is still done manually with pen and paper. To figure out why compliance is so low, they noticed medical staff wiped their hands on their scrubs, which led to an important insight for brainstorming possible solutions and ultimately the creation of a new product and corporation, SwipeSense.
8. Improving the effectiveness of medication: IDEO worked on a project to help with the accurate dispensing and taking of pills, a major reason that medicine is not as effective and it was designed to be.
9. Hospital utilization and reduced infection rates: One US healthcare provider, for example, scoured multiple sources of patient and operational data, from interviews to medical records to motion-tracking cameras. As a result, it redesigned the way care was delivered, reconfiguring hospital layout to minimize cross-infection and reduce length of stay by 10 percent.
10. Hospital systems using design thinking to solve their healthcare problems: 
    1. Mayo Clinic: One of the first Healthcare Facilities to use Design Thinking in Healthcare in the early 2000's. Design Thinking had delivered myriad small improvements through its center for Innovation (CFI), but could it deliver transformational improvements. Read more in this Yale University case study
    2. Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Indiana: The hospital wanted to create the best cardio vascular experience for patients.
    3. Chief Andrew Isaac Health Clinic: develop a new and specialized outpatient clinic by understanding the living habits of native people and thus understand their culture, their sense of community and expectations.
    4. Kaiser Permanente: Nurse Knowledge exchange used design thinking to eliminate the gap in care between nurse shift changes
    5. Whittington Hospital, UK: used design thinking to help them reduce waiting times and increase patient satisfaction
    6. Rotterdam Eye Hospital: transforming the hospital from long dreary corridors, impersonal waiting rooms, the smell of disinfectant
11. Driving Earlier Diagnosis and Care for Alzheimer’s Disease: only 50% of those living with Alzheimer's have been diagnosed.
12.  The Design Institute for Health: The first-of-its-kind institute was founded in 2015 as a unique collaboration between the Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The institute explores new ways that design can improve healthcare and they believe that the opportunities are endless. Read this interview.
13. Reducing missed medical appointments. Each year approximately 3.6 million people miss or put off medical appointments due to transportation issues. Design thinking, putting yourself in the shoes of the patient and seeing the problems from their perspective, something that does not happen in exit surveys, proved to be the clue to how to improve no shows.
14. Public Health: saving lives at a global scale
15. Tim Brown, IDEO talks about the role of design thinking in Healthcare through a number of examples of design thinking project work around the world in one of his TEDTalks.

Read more about the effectiveness of design thinking in healthcare in projects on this site at the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Indiana, Chief Andrew Isaac Health Clinic, Kaiser Permanente and the Whittington Hospital which all provide additional ideas on the types of problems you can use design thinking to help you solve.

For a full index of all The Design Thinking Association articles on design thinking in healthcare, visit our Healthcare sector page