Applying Design Thinking for Rural healthcare

I am a practitioner of #DesignThinking and conduct open workshops for over a decade. We apply design thinking for designing world's best banking software under Intellect Design Arena

In one of the design workshops, someone asked a question - How can we apply Design thinking practices in solving complex Rural development problems? In another workshop I received a similar question - how do you solve Tertiary healthcare problem of rural India.

Yes Its about ‘right questions’ which are more important in design thinking parlance. We need to understand persona of the customer first. Understanding his emotional map is equally important. We needed to understand Desirability, Feasibility and Viability triangle for designing right experience for the customer.

We observed that most of the specialist hospitals are in urban cities and not closer to rural customer. The hospital’s rural service teams bring patients to these hospitals for appropriate treatment. It's an efficient model because of 2 reasons:

A. Viability of Hospital infrastructure against high capital expenses in rural setting.

B. Lack of availability of Specialist Doctors in Rural spaces.

But from customer's perspective, the urban setting is intimidating and built on crutches of "someone else's help". It takes a lot of efforts and time to enter the city hospital - Just navigating the roads of urban city on his own is a ‘project’ for the family of the patient besides the other expenses he has to incur.

With this insight we decided to setup not for profit, charitable ADK Jain Eye Hospital at Village Khekra, Dist Baghpat near the community. Designed with a capacity to serve more than two hundred thousand patients and twenty thousand surgeries a year, this facility spans across 50,000 sqft. Dr Manju Jain Verma, MD, PhD and ophthalmic surgeon from Sydney Australia personally designed all services at world class level. Dr Ruma Gupta, MD and Ophthalmic surgeon has dedicated her services to run this hospital.

It was a humbling experience for me at the opening ceremony of the ADK Jain Eye Hospital yesterday by Shri. Atul Garg, Hon’ble Minister for Health Services for the State of UP and Shri. Satyapal Singh, Member of Parliament, Baghpat district in the presence of hundreds of participants from the local community. In just 8 weeks of alpha launch of the Operation Theatre, the hospital has performed Cataract surgeries for over 600 patients and OPD for 10,000 needy.

I must appreciate thru this message the power of the team who believed in this lateral vision and helped in completing the hospital from land acquisition to building completion to interior design to equipping with a world class Operation theatre in just 21 months. Pramod Balakrishnan designed the 5 floor ‘Non Hospital’ building interconnected with light, Visual and green spaces. The Community amphitheatre in front of the hospital invites patients and participate in treatment with well trained local community staff and expert doctors.

I must acknowledge a few names who participated in this mission of creating world class hospital near rural community - Dr Manju J Verma, Dr Ruma Gupta, Prabhjyot Singh Sambhy, Pramod Balakrishnan, Dr Amod Kumar, Manju Jain, Dr Sudarshan Gupta, Dr Vivek Gupta, Dr Aravind, Arun Arora, Yogesh Andlay, Adish Jain, Vinod Jain, Dr Uma Gupta, Rajesh Jain, Maruthi Machani, Umesh Gupta from Ish Putra, Navin Gupta, Dr P K Gupta, Dr Shalini Agarwal, Dr Vikas Anand, Dr Deepak Dhama, Sangita and many many more.

#DesignThinking #DesignThinkingForHealthcare #Healthcare #EyeSpecialityHospital