W21C: Designing medical care for the 21st century

HealthRedesigned

Today, I am talking with Sydney Johnson a Human Factors Research Associate at W21C a health systems research and innovation initiative based at the University of Calgary’s O'Brien Institute for Public Health and Alberta Health Services. W21C researches and tests prototypes for hospital design, new approaches to healthcare, human factors, and other medical technologies to improve the delivery of healthcare.

Sydney also has a background in UX design and service design. W21C is a university-based non-profit with a vision of making care better and defining the future of health. In 2004, the idea of creating the ward of the 21st century was born. The Foothills Campus is inside of Foothills hospital, so it is a real medical ward and they have access to a patient care setting. They also have the W21C research and innovation centre and a simulation lab. Today, Sydney shares how the organization is moving forward with healthcare innovation and design.

Episode Highlights:

• The W21C has a 40 person interdisciplinary team. This allows them to look at research from several perspectives.
• They also have physicians and academics who want to find solutions to health challenges.
• They also help AHS Alberta Health Services requests and public priority challenges.
• They also partner with private industries to test viability and determine if there is a need.
• How they are focused on digital health and ageing in place. They want to keep people out of the care systems longer.
• They want to enable senior citizens to age better.
• There is also a big focus on better managing digital health and supporting information flow.
• One of the new technologies they are working on is augmented reality for medical procedures.
• How it’s interesting to see the future of medical technology.
• Sydney works on the human factors team which understands how people interact with the world around them.
• The design process includes running projects through an ethical review board.
• The research has to be very sound because it is in healthcare.
• Sydney discovered that the healthcare space was very interesting and wanted to be a part of it.
• One of the projects they worked on was a visual design for a hand sanitizer pump. It was scalable and did encourage hand hygiene.
• One of the things they tried was flat ceiling tiles to eliminate areas where germs can gather.
• Another human factor project was toilet design for handicapped people.
• The importance of the research they do and the resistance to change and how it is important to convince people and communicate the value of the project.
• The importance of involving users in projects.
• How they are open to requests for information.

Resources:

• W21C
• ScopeAR
• W21C facebook
• W21C Twitter
• W21C Instagram

Listen to this HealthRedesigned podcast episode on Hanno's website