Balancing sustainability with effectiveness lies at the heart of a prosperous healthcare system
Dubai has ambitions to become the happiest city on Earth. The government’s Happiness Agenda is explicit about this, and the health of its population is set to play a central role.
Healthcare is as much about interactions between patients and providers as it is about infrastructure and drugs, or doctors and nurses. Focusing on these interactions is where service design can play a role to create good health outcomes for patients. Designing how patients access services, where they do so, and how they use technology to enable this presents an opportunity to innovate within healthcare that could make a significant difference to the management of a variety of conditions.
If innovation in this space is managed well it could enable the UAE to become a leading influencer of global thinking around chronic care, with the financial and influential benefits that this would generate.
Within the healthcare sector, service design principles can be applied to a range of opportunities, including both patient-facing elements of a service, as well as the valuable back-end components that a patient may never see. Designing services that bring together the people, the stakeholders, the physical infrastructure, the processes, the technology, and the data within the healthcare system can start now.