Design & Healing: Mobile Testing and Vaccination Field Sites
Hospitals around the world have demonstrated that safe, robust, innovative services can be developed quickly in times of need.
People, Environments, and Processes
A service design involves the people who are implementing and receiving the service, the environments where the service takes place, and the processes that enable the service to be delivered.
Covid-19 Testing Site Routing DesignCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Environments
Designing a testing or vaccination site requires finding locations and partners, determining the traffic pattern on each property and in the surrounding neighborhoods, and planning tented and/or climate controlled areas for greeting and treating patients. The Health Design Lab at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital designed COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites in vulnerable communities in Philadelphia.
Flow Coordination
The team captured these plans in a comprehensive training document for staff as well as in video tutorials explaining daily set-up and break-down.
“We wanted people to be able to come in and get a COVID test with no appointment, no doctor’s order, no insurance. They could drive in or walk in, get the test done quickly, and then be able to speak with one of our providers.”
-Dr. Morgan Hutchinson, co-director of Jefferson’s Community COVID Testing Initiative
Environments are both physical and digital; Jefferson’s community testing sites had to track patient data as well as create a welcoming and safe site for patients and staff.
Processes
This detail of a larger process diagram shows the route taken by a person who has learned about the service, has called before coming, and has made an appointment. A walk-up or drive-up patient can be registered and served without calling in advance.
Service Design Basics
Each service requires tools and processes that users interact with as well as actions taking place behind the scenes. A service involves people (patients, staff, clinicians, administrators, social workers), physical and digital environments (lobbies, exam rooms, electronic health records, billing software), and processes (workflows and step-by-step encounters).
Design components included the sites’ physical layout, the step-by-step flow of testing patients, staffing plans for operating the service, and community outreach. The team addressed similar concerns when designing vaccination sites.
Volunteers at Covid-19 Testing Site TentCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
People
If individuals don’t trust, want, or understand your service, then it cannot succeed. Effective service design delivers positive value to clients in a manner that is safe, efficient, and sustainable for workers.
“Management and frontline employees have to consider how customers exist within a system of experiences and ask how all of these elements work together.”
—Service designer Natalie Nixon
Volunteers at Covid-19 Testing SiteCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
By combining people, processes, and environments in unison, we can create safe and effective sites.
Design & Healing: Mobile Testing and Vaccination Field Sites content is from Health Design Thinking: Creating Products and Services for Better Health, 2nd Edition by Bon Ku, MD and Ellen Lupton (2021, Cooper Hewitt / MIT Press) Story author: Alyssa Perales
