New book from HDR explores opportunities for how healthcare organizations can reinvent the patient experience

HDR has recently published a new report that explores one of the biggest challenges facing healthcare organizations today: how to respond to increasing unknowns in the industry while encouraging future-focused innovation. Healthcare strategists, retail strategists, lean operation experts, architects, designers, data analysts and engineers worked together to write the report. Named Delta (after the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet) the report examines four different opportunities that emerge from embracing change:

Creating a foundation of innovation within healthcare organizations that helps orient problems in an approachable way.
Understanding that healthcare providers aren’t being compared to other healthcare providers, they’re being compared to service providers in other industries—creating a need to adopt strategies that translate retail thinking to healthcare.
Challenging the common assumptions made about what the patient experience is and how healthcare organizations should be thinking about it.
Imagining a new, more central role for nature in chronic disease management.

Delta offers a close look at specific activities and behaviors that can help healthcare providers and caregivers discover revolutionary concepts to help them embrace and thrive in the rapid change that surrounds them.

A complementary copy of Delta is available for immediate download at: hdrinc.com/delta or a printed copy can be requested by emailing delta@hdrinc.com.

For most of human history, design has mostly considered “typical users” who are fully able-bodied without clinical or emotional disabilities. The problem with this approach is that it offers a limited perspective on how space can positively or negatively influence someone based on their physical, mental, and sensory abilities.

In Duluth, Minn., the new St. Mary’s Medical Center, designed by EwingCole, is now the largest healthcare facility in the region Photo courtesy EwingCole

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