This new collaboration will work on Radboudumc projects as well as ‘regional’ trajectories in scripted sessions. The center (part of the Radboudumc REshape Center and based at their HQ on the campus in Nijmegen) will service and facilitate in creating patient- and healthcare professional-journeys and will transform them into tangible products that will be marketed.

Technology is moving fast and almost everything seems possible. We see a lot about organisations moving their ‘bricks’ to ‘bytes’, but tend to forget the most important aspect of it: behavioural change.

Design thinking is not easy to describe in one line of text. The core value is to understand the people you want to help, defining the problem(s) with the targeted group (#patientsincluded), creating ideas, building prototypes and finally: Testing the solution and keep iterating.

One of the main differences between user centred design (UCD) and human centred design (HCD) is that in UCD you assume you know the goal a user tries to achieve with your product or service. In a HCD project, the first task is to understand the people you want to help. In our case: patients, family and informal care. Healthcare professionals tend to view processes from their perspective and only strong signals pass through their boundaries, while often the subtle messages, the little daily annoyances for patients matter the most to them.

For the past 6 years we’ve been in this in several stages and methods. Together with these professionals, patients ánd industry we used Design Thinking principles in most of our projects, mostly in our well known ‘30 day projects’. We’ve seen Design Thinking in all of its phases reach the healthcare sector as a separate system and methodology. In our journey we’re convinced it has to be an integrated process where the prototyping at the ‘rear-end’ has to be included.

That’s where our friends from Growtivity come in. Growtivity is a company that designs e-health solutions (we actually like digital health solutions better), mostly powered by the Salesforce platform to develop and distribute them. At REshape we already had access to all the different modules, solutions and products of Salesforce. Growtivity has an extensive track record in the combination of Design Thinking and rapid prototyping that leads to execution into real products and the distribution of them.

By combining our efforts, network and energy we want to speed up the pace at which a new innovation get into the hands of patients, family and informal care and of course healthcare-professionals.

Our aim is to co-create the “REshape Center for European Health(care) Design” in the next couple of months. European since we think in this globalising world everything should at least be bi-lingual (Dutch and English in our case), the investments that are needed are most often too big for the Dutch market and last but not least we’re increasingly working on a global level to improve global health.

This next step aligns with the effort Radboudumc is taking with other corporates like Philips to innovate in co-creation with targeted groups and industry.