MDI: Refining Community Mental Health Settings: How Design Thinking can Improve Provider and Patient Satisfaction

As things currently stand, healthcare delivery could best be characterized by archaic systems and process, high and opaque costs, and uneven quality. Community mental health settings are no different. While we are rich in evidence-based innovations (ACT, supported employment, symptom specific interventions), that innovation is disseminated slowly. Design-based thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that focuses on the end-users of a product or process, which seeks to challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It offers a process and mechanism for addressing the very difficult problems we see in community mental health settings that can energize providers and patients alike. In this presentation, we will review what design based thinking is, how it can be effectively deployed, and tools that can help leaders implement this process.