Crossing Asymmetries in Multistakeholder Service Design in Integrated Care

Designing for services to cater to clients with complex service needs in health and social care presents a tricky design challenge. Multiprofessional, cross-sectoral health and social care that involves multiple care system levels is a co-design context that requires context-specific knowledge, such as on evidence-based care and particular design competences to include the perspectives of diverse actors in design processes. Grounding on a literature review and reflecting on our experiences in a research project, we argue, that multistakeholder service design in health and social care involves knowledge asymmetries on various system levels that need to be crossed to reach new knowledge for design. In the project, we brought together diverse health and social care service ecosystem actors to co-design human-centered solutions for integrated care. To elaborate on how the knowledge asymmetries occur in multistakeholder service design for health and social care, and extend across different care system levels, we present an initial model of cross-level service design. Designing for services in this complex setting needs to strive to integrate evidence-based care and design practices and account for the knowledge asymmetries across levels.