Abstract:

Collaborative work and agility to rethink processes are essential priorities for healthcare professionals (Schot, Tummers, & Noordegraaf, 2020; Vaishnavi, Suresh, & Dutta, 2019). However, opportunities to develop these skills are rare, especially in pandemic times when face-to-face multi-stakeholder sessions are limited. Design thinking is emerging in healthcare, providing the necessary tools to facilitate critical thinking, creative problem solving, and effective communication between teams (Lyon & Koerner, 2016; Searl, Borgi, & Chemali, 2010). How can we guarantee empathy and collaboration, essential to an innovation process (McDonagh & Thomas, 2010), with remote teams? The ability to share tacit knowledge is critical to innovation (Leonard & Sensiper, 1998), and the exploration of digital co-creation sessions could enable organizations to adapt quickly to changes, promoting knowledge transfer and innovation capabilities.

The goal was to guide a diverse team of hospital managers and healthcare professionals from different hospitals through a Design Thinking (DT) process (Brown & Wyatt, 2010) to rethink operating room (OR) efficiency in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have developed a framework for remote teams based on the three DT stages: discovery, ideation, and implementation. We used our experience in our Design Thinking remote emergency teaching strategies to transfer the knowledge to the hospital context and facilitate the process in three online sessions (two asynchronous and one Synchronous).

The engagement was high throughout the different stages of the process. We had an 85% participant rate in the asynchronous session (stage 1) with 336 responses from 22 participants. In the synchronous ideation workshop (stage 2), 20 insights were formulated from 11 participants. Finally, in the stage 3 webinar, 30 participants enrolled in the discussion on how to overcome the implementation hurdles in the ophthalmology context.

Pandemics offer incentives for experimental approaches to emerge and the sharing of experiences between industry and academia. Methodologies such as design thinking can be implemented without jeopardizing empathy and the creative collaborative process.

Keywords:

Design Thinking, Remote Teams, Emergency Remote Teaching, Operating Room Efficiency, Healthcare Innovation Teams.