Streamlining Healthcare Knowledge

This past summer I had the opportunity to intern with Delve, a product design company with a speciality in medical devices. Having accumulated numerous guideline documents, design artifacts, and media (photo and video) over many years of work in the medical field, they sought a way to collect and organize this information into a centralized library of institutional knowledge to help with onboarding for future projects and to streamline research efforts. I was tasked with helping to accomplish this.

The question: How can we take the knowledge that Delve already has, and organize it in a way that is most useful and maintainable for the teams who need access to it?

The goals/requirements: • Collect existing documents and artifacts from the disparate locations and departments where they are currently housed

Interview key stakeholders to identify use cases, pain points with current information access, and future visions for what this library could look like

Decide on a strategy for organizing the information, and make note of what information still needs to be collected

In pursuit of these goals, we carried out the following steps during the project:

Gathered 2000+ documents from many past projects into a centralized file repository

Interviewed team members from Insights & Strategy, Human Factors Engineering, Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, and Project Management to determine needs for different types of information, preferred content delivery types, and use cases for healthcare knowledge within Delve's different practice areas

Based on these interviews and previous knowledge, decided on an environment-based organization system (organizing documents based on which healthcare environment they were associated with)

Chose the Operating Room environment as a pilot test case for our organization system

After presenting our initial work to the head of the Insights and Strategy department, as well as senior Human Factors team members, our team was given the go-ahead to continue this organization strategy with a second case study environment, the ICU. The resources we have curated and created will be used by future researchers in Human Factors, Insights & Strategy, and Industrial Design to streamline project onboarding and jumpstart new projects.

Use what's already there: sometimes, you don't need to go out and do new research - it's just as effective (and more efficient!) to make use of previous work

Form matters as much as content: it doesn't matter how good the resources are, if people can't figure out how to navigate them.

A picture really is worth a thousand words: visuals are very helpful, particularly in situations where people new to a project might not know all the technical terms yet.