Rising to the Challenge

By Susan Dix Lyons

What’s it like when you get some of the country’s top healthcare designers on a Zoom call to discuss ways to address the COVID-19 pandemic?

Well, messy, for sure. 

And hopeful.

On Friday, March 20, 33 healthcare design leaders from around the country convened to figure out how to leverage their individual skills and networks to confront the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized by UCSF trauma surgeon and founder of The Better Lab Amanda Sammann, the group represents UCSF, Stanford University, the d.school, Harvard, Yale, University of Texas Austin, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of Pittsburg Medical Center, University of Illinois at Chicago, IDEO, Frog Design, and leading consultants in healthcare design. The objective? To bring together designers to quickly solve for urgent needs.

It’s a design challenge of an immense scale, mobilizing collaborative efforts to address everything from supply chain and manufacturing to support for vulnerable populations sheltering in place – all on the fly.

“The COVID pandemic has created a humanitarian crisis unmatched in modern history. It’s impacted not only the health and wellness of our most vulnerable citizens, but the wellness of our health care system, our economy and our daily lives,” said Sammann. “For the first time in my life, the entire world is facing the same catastrophe together.  We’re relying on each other and learning from each other and we’re having to innovate quickly.”

At Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where Sammann and some of her colleagues work, many patients are especially at risk for poor outcomes due to either medical comorbidities and age or socioeconomic disadvantages. But everywhere, there is a desperate need for innovative problem solving. Designers are needed more than ever before.    

“There’s never been a more urgent time,” said Nick Dawson, Sammann’s co-leader in the launch. Dawson worked as the Executive Director of Innovation for Kaiser Permanente, the largest nonprofit healthcare provider in the U.S., and also led the Innovation Hub at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “We need to work open, stay open – and focus on things that can be delivered.”

And quick delivery is key. With the number of those testing positive in the U.S. doubling every 2-3 days, we understand the importance of creating a strategy that’s actionable – and fast.

What are some of the early questions?

How do we give guidance to grassroots organizations and initiatives that are eager to help?

How do we support a healthcare workforce that is ravaged?

How do we think creatively about resource scarcity?

And the biggest question of all:

If there are 20 million people with this virus in 2 months, what would we wish we had done today?

That’s something the consortium will be pressing to answer.

We'll be looking for input not just from designers and healthcare workers but people everywhere. It’s a historic moment where each of us can help make things better for each other and the world.

We hope you’ll join us by sharing your ideas, challenges, comments and skills here. We’ll keep you posted on our progress every few days. Fired up. Ready to go.