The Beyond Words PODS Design Event

This past Thursday, groups of patients, providers, designers, patient relations representatives, and patient education representatives came together to design patient oriented discharge summaries. The day was a big success and the groups worked together amazingly well. After a brief introduction to the project, we got right to work.

The groups rotated through 4 stations, each with a case study of patient's stay in hospital. The groups were faced with the task to be creative and think of the ideal PODS for that patient in 20 minutes. Meet our 4 case studies:

1. Wen-Yang, the 10-year old refugee, new to Toronto with his mom and younger brother who is diagnosed with pneumonia and spend the night in the hospital. Due to mis-communication, Wen-yang end up returning to the ER unnecessarily 2 days later.

2. Lisa, an 87 year-old Italian woman who loses her independence after an unexpected bypass surgery due to chronic heart failure. She cannot keep on top of all the guidelines surrounding her many new medications.

3. George, a 22 year-old international university student from Greece, who is in a car accident and suffers many injuries. He suffers memory loss and has trouble getting back into the swing of things.

4. Jose, a middle-aged taxi driver suffering from kidney failure, diabetes, and obesity among other things. He is in the hospital for something minor and ends up with a hospital-contracted infection.

The solutions that resulted were amazing. They were more traditional discharge summaries that were enhanced with multiple languages and images to make things more clear to patients. They all included key information patients wanted such as phone numbers of who to call with questions and expectations of what to expect in the first week home form the hospital. Almost all of the solutions contained some sort of calendar view. There were solutions that developed apps to connect patients to their care plan, their families, resources int he community, and their doctors. There were solutions that included interactive patient portals with educational videos. There were solutions that came with stickers to color-code your medications,areas for patients to write notes, and checklists for them to keep track of all their follow up plans. There was even one solution that included a weighted placemat that looked like a calendar and held all the patient's pills. If the patient missed a few pills, the next of kn would receive an automatic message.

The Beyond Words project team is going to systematically review all the solutions and designs. I can't wait to see what comes out of this amazing event. Here are some pictures from the event.