VERONICA X. VELA
Advancing Population & Community Health
Through Innovative Problem Solving
INNOVATION EDUCATION IN MEDICAL SCHOOL
THE CHALLENGE
In 2018, George Washington University (GW) Medical School tasked third year medical students with developing solutions to address obesity among women and children in Washington, D.C., which is a large problem in Washington, D.C. The city ranks 50th out of the 51 states for obesity.
Many universities focus on traditional population health methods, such as reviewing the literature, analyzing trends and using scholarly frameworks to create interventions. However, GW wanted to add human centered design (HCD) as another method to teach medical school students to integrate input from the community.
We wanted to know:
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How might we create a HCD training session and workshop for medical student leaders?
MY ROLE
Workshop Design
Facilitation
CREATING A DRAFT AGENDA
AND GATHERING FEEDBACK
In collaboration with the Associate Director for Student Entrepreneurship, I developed a draft agenda for the workshop. We documented assumptions underpinning the approach and identified questions to help us refine the draft.
Next we approached our client, the Director of Community and Urban Health, reviewed the assumptions, questions and agenda. We quickly learned that some of our assumptions were wrong and that instead of a day long workshop we would only have 1 hour.
LEVEL SETTING AND NEGOTIATING
We quickly learned that out client had limited familiarity with what it would take to impart the design process. In order to level set the team's knowledge, we discussed considerations that students would need to make as they moved through the phases of the design process. We highlighted various brainstorming techniques that could illicit interesting solutions. Our client increased our workshop time, but late planning would mean that we could only secure an additional hour. We were challenged to share the entire design process yet focus on the most salient components that would be most helpful for the students - in two hours.
We had the best obesity projects presented this year. The students understood the need to gather input from the community. We definitely want to teach human centered design to students in next year's program.
Dean of Clinical Public Health
George Washington University Medical School
FOCUS AREAS
The workshop focused on the following three areas:
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Problem framing
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Expressing challenges as user needs
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Brainstorming solutions
The workshop called on students to think about how to apply these skills to an issue near and dear to their heart: student burn out. By focusing on a problem they were knowledgable about, it allowed them to focus on the skills we were teaching.
ARTIFACTS
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Workshop Presentation
Visual Design: Scott Stein
OUTCOMES
The workshop was a success and the participants felt that they had the appropriate tools to listen to the needs of end users - parents - who make decisions that facilitate health living for children. The Deans and Professors involved shared that they would like to incorporate human centered design as another technique that medical students learn in order to design effective health interventions.
