My personal mission is “to lead design for a compassionate world,” and my role as Chief Experience Officer gives me the opportunity to enact that in healthcare. Using Human-Centered Design (HCD) methodologies, I’ve collaborated with dozens of clinicians on building technologies and experiences so humans can care for other humans.

One of these clinicians is Joshua Reed, D.O., medical director of case management and utilization review at Hendrick Health, an Altera Digital Health client and three-hospital system based in Abilene, Texas.

Dr. Reed and I recently connected with Healthcare Innovation and HealthLeaders to discuss our work. Here is a snippet of what we shared.

Human-Centered Design in action

Dr. Reed serves as the chair of Hendrick Health’s physician advisory committee, which steers electronic health record (EHR) implementation. We met more than two years ago to work on improvements to the Sunrise™ EHR.

This process began with ethnographic research. Members of the Altera Human Experience (HX) design team traveled to Texas and shadowed Hendrick Health clinicians for hours, observing their tasks, interactions, pain points and more. We then compared those insights to findings we gathered at other hospitals. Four patterns emerged: a push for simplicity, getting physicians back to basic tasks, managing regulation-driven alerts in the EHR and a need to focus on patients.

From there, the HX team bounced around ideas with Dr. Reed and his colleagues to identify ways we could better meet the needs of clinicians and improve Sunrise. As the design process ramped up, we met regularly with Hendrick Health team members and team members from other client partners, bringing them working prototypes and soliciting feedback.

With each iteration, we addressed input from Hendrick Health clinicians as well as other clients’ clinicians and internal Altera clinicians, developers and coders. This non-linear, interdisciplinary process enables us to build the “right thing” for the market and the humans leveraging Altera technology.

Check out Healthcare Innovation and HealthLeaders to hear from Dr. Reed on his experience partnering with the Altera HX team.