Medical School Partnership: Shared Decision Making Tool
Our Design for Social Impact class partnered with Washington University Medical School and the St. Louis Children’s hospital to create a shared decision making tool for patients and doctors.
Craniosynostosis is a condition where sutures in a newborn’s skull fuse pre-maturely. These fused bones cause a child’s head to look misshapen and put pressure on the brain, altering its growth. There are two types of surgical operations to treat the condition (endoscopic and open), with different benefits and complications. There is no standard for communicating the different options for parents (some doctors communicate vocally, some use powerpoint presentations, etc), so physicians from St. Louis Children’s Hospital came to us to design a tool that physicians can use to communicate with parents.
We used a human-centered design approach, interviewing parents and different physicians and synthesizing their input, to learn more about their experience and what would be helpful for the different users in a tool. The focus of this project was less on aesthetics, and more on functionality, accessibility, and the design thinking process. You can learn more about our process and insights in our presentation.
FALL 2019
SUPERVISION: JUDE AGBOADA
HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN, DESIGN THINKING, Design research
In collaboration with Amanda Im (design), Lianne Kang (web design), Ali White (illustration), and Kristina You (web design) as well as Said Abdullah (medical student researcher). Personal contributions include design research, conducting interviews, prototyping, and print/layout design.
We used the KWHL model (Know, What, How, Learn) to synthesize thoughts and findings before and after our user interviews.
Here are some examples of early prototypes. We got feedback from a mother we interviewed that having something she could take home after her discussion with the physician would be useful, so we landed on a pamphlet that synthesized the information verbally presented by doctors.
She also noted however, that she used the St. Louis children’s hospital website for more information as well. We thought it would be a good idea to create a printed pamphlet as well as a web page so the information was available in different forms.
We worked closely with Said Abdullah, a medical student and collaborator on the project, to get the content and writing correct. He communicated that the doctors wanted a system to code or score different pros and cons of each surgery. This became a difficult task, considering one of our main goals was to minimize physician bias. It was also difficult to quantify outcomes because, for example, more scarring is a negative outcome but less blood loss is a positive outcome, so it was hard to create a symbol that could communicate that effectively.
Not all components of surgery are equally important to all caregivers. So we landed on including something similar to this guide by the Mayo clinic (theirs was for concussions) This way, the user played an active role in recognizing what aspects of a certain surgery were important to them, instead of us the designers tell them that is “better” or “worse.”
Ali re-illustrated the medical illustrations we were presented with to make them feel more relatable and accessible. Originals (left) New illustrations (right)