Intersection of Design and Healthcare

A journey of discovery.

Photo by Shapelined on Unsplash

Introduction by Marzia Aricò

Today’s piece is written by Dan Pérez, with whom I worked a few years back on a customer-centricity program at a large pharma in the States. I asked Dan to reflect on his journey as a design leader entering and navigating a big pharma corporation. I believe his reflections are relevant for many design leaders and practitioners independent of the sector they operate in.

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Intersection of Design and Healthcare by Dan Pérez

Reflecting on my journey at the intersection of design and healthcare, I realise that despite significant strides, design still needs to gain full recognition as a vital business function. The broad corporate restructuring affecting designers and design teams in 2023, and the first half of 2024, suggests this may be true across many industries. This trend underscores the complex and often challenging career path designers face in which their business contributions are being marginalised.

Several years back, I moved from the Midwest to the West Coast of the USA to join a large biotech company and a corporate design group. I had chosen to devote all my time to the complex world of healthcare and transitioning into a working environment I had only previously supported as a consultant.

Despite the familiar design challenges, I found myself in a completely new landscape. I was well-versed in my role as a designer, but it took nearly a year to grasp the unique dynamics of a corporate structure. Some hurdles included adjusting to a highly matrixed organisation with diverse functions, hierarchies, team structures, and decision-making processes. Numerous situations demanded a rethinking of my usual strategies to achieve the objectives.

For instance, communicating findings wasn’t enough to keep programs moving forward. Communications had to be prepared to persuade multiple stakeholders in various functions, levels of organisational influence, and degrees of subject matter understanding. This meant needing additional time and effort to manage communications and multiple ways to present data to ensure the project(s) were not derailed or scrapped before starting to work on the solution.  

I had to be more careful and intentional when using design terminology. As designers, it's crucial to be mindful of our terminology. Our profession has its own language, which can be confusing for those unfamiliar with it. Knowing when and how to use design terms is vital, especially when terms have multiple meanings. For example, the term Service(s) (i.e., Service Map, Service Design) can be understood as offering customers ‘something of value’ in exchange for treatment preference. In a highly regulated environment, this is not allowed. Therefore, the word ‘service’ was often interrogated or rejected, resulting in sidetracked presentations and forward progress.  

Designing a human-centred solution is a much more complicated commercial endeavour in healthcare. Keeping the end user in mind is not enough. Healthcare is full of direct and indirect interdependencies that, if not accounted for, will result in a solution that may never see the light of day. How is the solution delivered, and who is presenting it to the patient? Who is educating the patient and the healthcare professional who interacts with the patient? Who pays for the solution, the manufacturer or the payer? These are but a fraction of the questions that must be asked in healthcare early in the process before the solution requirements are even defined.

Working in healthcare has been and continues to be an exhilarating experience for me. It is filled with countless opportunities to leverage design to improve patient products and overall experiences amidst evolving healthcare models.

I want to offer my insights into the unique intersection of design and healthcare within the biotech industry, and based on my experience, illuminate what it's been like to navigate this space. These insights may also be similar across other sectors. 

1. Everyone thinks they can design. With the proliferation of design thinking, facilitated workshops, and certificate programs, individuals with little to no experience try to adopt and become design experts, only to find out it takes much more than a workshop to get meaningful results. More frequently than not, failed attempts at incorporating design methods have undermined Designs’ value to the business, compelling leadership teams to view design as having little to no value.

At times, the rise of overnight ‘design experts’ made me feel as if my years of design experience were deemed irrelevant, commoditising my professional value. However, reframing the situation revealed an opportunity for me to leverage the momentum of the problem. Here’s what I did differently:

• Stop protecting design as if it were sacred. Truth-be-told design thinking can be added to a long list of business tools and methods that have gained popularity in the past decade, including Agile Methodology, Lean Startup, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Lean Six Sigma, to name a few. There will always be new trendy approaches in the business world, along with many individuals claiming overnight expertise.

• Collaborate with those who are truly curious and open to improving their work. These colleagues have helped me amplify design's value, and in return, I’ve helped them learn why, when, and how to best apply a new set of problem-solving tools. This approach has been particularly rewarding with leadership partners, turning them into design advocates across the organisation.

• Learn to translate design into business lingo. By this, I mean specifically translating business performance indicators dealing with value creation, profit, growth, efficiency, and effectively rising above Design as a novel business tool or any other tool for that matter. As designers, we need to commit time to the process of learning how best to communicate in business terms.

2. Functional overlap obscures design roles. Designers often struggle to articulate their roles within a corporate organisation due to the overlap with functions like research, strategy, product development, marketing, and IT. This overlap blurs their specific contributions and makes their strategic value harder to define and recognise.   

This reality has impacted me on more than one occasion in my career. Whether in consulting or corporate, this is a reality that is not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. However, with every instance, I’ve learned something about my career journey, and it’s been an opportunity for reinvention and pivot. For example,

• Although design remains central to my thinking, I no longer identify solely as a designer. I've embraced roles that integrate more closely with core company operations, now seeing myself as an expert in healthcare and product commercialisation. This shift has expanded my understanding of the healthcare industry beyond just design.  

• Design will always be my superpower; however, I now prioritise business needs and choose the best tool(s) for each challenge, which isn't always Design. When appropriate, I apply design seamlessly and discreetly, resulting in more significant outcomes with less organisational friction.

3. Distracting Shiny Objects. With the proliferation of out-of-the-box technology solutions, many teams use these 'shiny new objects,' often seen as cure-alls for business issues. Artificial Intelligence and wearable devices, for example, are poised to revolutionise our lives in unforeseen ways. However, in healthcare, these technologies are more frequently implemented without a clear understanding of the underlying issues they are meant to solve, turning them into solutions in search of a problem.

• On the other hand, this presents a significant opportunity for designers. Given that the core of many healthcare challenges is human behaviour, design—bridging technology and human behaviour—positions designers to remain in high demand. Design's unique perspective is essential in addressing and solving healthcare issues effectively.

4. Mapping the course. Mapping a career path in pharma is particularly challenging for designers who wish to maintain their design identity. It's common for pharma professionals to rotate through various roles to gain broader experience and advance within the organisation.

• As noted earlier, I no longer identify solely as a designer and have decided to go all in as a healthcare professional (with Design superpowers, of course). This has allowed me to shift my thinking in ways that have made it easier to define a more straightforward career path in healthcare without renouncing my professional skill set.

5. Adaptability is vital. Forcing my vision of how design should function within an organisation has led to some disappointment. As designers, we thrive on change and adaptability. However, remaining open and flexible has proven more rewarding, allowing me to apply design in unexpectedly effective ways.

• Healthcare is experiencing unprecedented change. The industry is becoming more competitive, margins are being compressed, and more patients needing care struggle to access, pay for, and navigate interventions. I’m confident that, in the long run, focusing on improving patient outcomes and experiences will be far more productive than worrying about design recognition. 

Looking ahead, I’ve established a set of design principles to help guide my decisions. Look for the right opportunities, maintain my optimism, and continue to thrive in healthcare. I am confident these will help generate results that will keep me making a difference for patients and the companies I work for and make healthcare a bit easier to navigate. 

Guiding Principles 

Don’t try to fix every problem. Prioritise and focus on what will create the most significant impact on patients, the company, and your personal brand. 

Shift from judgment to curiosity. Instead of making assumptions about why design isn’t being embraced, focus on the challenges healthcare is facing and listen attentively to peers, especially those further from your perspective. Seek to understand rather than to judge.  

Know your superpowers. Design capabilities are in short supply in almost every organisation; use your design superpowers to help improve the decades-long focus on process improvement and linear thinking driving businesses today.

Define your career path with intention. Ensure your career moves are strategic and intentional, plotting a roadmap that positions you for growth in areas you are most curious about.

Think like a designer and communicate like a business leader. Use your design skills to be innovative and to reimagine solutions, and as a business leader, translate these innovations into actionable strategies that drive business growth and meet organisational objectives.

While some may find my insights familiar, I hope others will discover valuable tips or inspiration for their own design journey. Please share how these insights connect with your design story.