Healthcare Innovation Research Program

Cohorts

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Designing the Future of Healthcare: A deep dive into innovation and problem-solving

Innovating in healthcare is a complex endeavor that involves multiple stakeholder groups from the patient to the patient’s family or caregivers, to scientists and engineers, to clinicians, to payers, to business and finance, to designers, to government, and to industry. Human-centered design thinking is used in problem-solving to build and accelerate biomedical and healthcare innovations. We will cover the history and basis behind design thinking, its role for problem-solving in medicine and healthcare, and how it has contributed to the ideation, design, development, and scaling of new healthcare services, devices, diagnostics, and therapeutics. This is a highly interactive pod where students will have the opportunity to dive deep through case studies on novel healthcare technologies, services, startups, or therapeutics of their choosing. Students will learn how to identify relevant sources of information, perform literature reviews, identify the intellectual property and regulatory landscape, interview stakeholders engaged in the development of these technologies, and learn more about the latest cutting-edge healthcare innovations.

Week by week curriculum

Week 1

During this first session, students will be introduced to the foundations of human centered design thinking. Students will learn about some of the newest innovations and technologies that have impacted medicine and healthcare to provide initial sources of inspirations to identify specific technologies that students will focus on throughout this pod. The foundations of biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship will be introduced.

Week 2

In this session, students will each identify and discuss 3 innovations or technologies that have reached the commercialization stage. In this week, we will focus on understanding the timeline and trajectory of each innovation or technology ideation, creation, development, and commercialization at a high level. We will focus on identifying positive and negative inflection points in these trajectories and its causes.

Week 3

Students will narrow onto a single innovation or technology as their main project. Students will work to deepen and expand their knowledge around the ideation, creation, development, and commercialization of the technology and innovation through literature review and stakeholder interviews. Topics such as problem definition, needs assessment, stakeholder analysis, and solution development will be introduced.

Week 4

Students will continue a mixed approach reviewing information from multiple sources including peer-reviewed publications, news articles, reports, and stakeholder interviews. Students will synthesize their findings into cohesive narrative identifying the roles of each stakeholder and the human-centered design thinking process. Topics such as market landscape analysis, intellectual property, and regulation will be introduced.

Week 5

Students will present their work to date and identify any challenges they are facing in developing their case study. Discussion will focus on the specific problems and hurdles that each technology faced during their trajectory to commercialization and how it was addressed. Students will work as a cohort to provide feedback on each other’s case studies. Students will start to identify commonalities and differences between their case studies.

Week 6

During this last and final week, students will give their final case study presentations. We will focus our time on learning from each of the new innovations or technologies that students have focused on by identifying commonalities and differences in the development of each innovation or technology, methods and strategies used to address challenges, and how it correlated with their ultimate trajectory, traction, and success.