UNMC held its first Health Design Thinking Showcase on Nov. 5.
Innovators in education, health care and research from across UNMC and the University of Nebraska at Omaha attended the event, which featured innovative projects, pitches and works-in-progress in the field of human-centered design — also known as design thinking.
Keynote speakers included Bon Ku, MD, director of the Health Design Lab at Thomas Jefferson University, and Morgan Hutchinson, MD, director of Education at the Health Design Lab, both members of the external advisory board for the program. The two remaining external advisory board members, Doug Dietz and Kathryn Segovia, PhD, joined remotely and took part in a board meeting during the week.
The showcase event followed a two-day health design thinking workshop earlier in the week that explored possible improvements in the clinical preceptor program.
Part of the idea behind design thinking is using outside-the-box ideas to benefit the people being served.
"This first showcase for Health Design Thinking on campus was a big success and illustrated the scope of problems that have already been tackled using human-centered design at UNMC and the potential for this approach to be transformational in creating solutions for a variety of challenges in the future," said Dele Davies, MD, senior vice chancellor for academic affairs.
UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, MD, welcomed the attendees via a recorded message.
"Creative problem solving is nothing new to us here at UNMC," Dr. Gold said. "But in 2019, we began to understand the merits of making health design thinking a major strategic initiative for our academic community. Today’s showcase is a testament to what can be achieved when our faculty, staff and students from a wide spectrum of interprofessional disciplines work together to address a problem, an issue or a grand challenge."
Dr. Davies inaugurated the UNMC Health Design Thinking program this fall. The program, supported by the UNMC Office of Academic Affairs and the chancellor’s office, will build upon UNMC’s success with design thinking workshops and the design thinking interest group of the Interprofessional Academy of Educators.
The workshop and forum were the first major events sponsored by the office, and Dr. Davies commended the work of Jennifer Kallio, DDS, Katherine Bravo, PhD, T.J. Welniak, MD, and Amy Pick, PharmD, the campus co-directors of health design thinking, for their success with the week’s events.
"They created a very innovative and engaging forum," Dr. Davies said.
He also thanked the external advisory board, which includes Drs. Ku and Hutchinson, for its constructive feedback on the progress and input into the campus strategic plan for growing UNMC into a national leader in health-centered design thinking, as well as Dr. Gold and the deans for supporting the program.
Great work! Congrats to the team!