Healthcare Complexity and the Role of Service Design in Complex Healthcare Systems

There is a continuous change in healthcare experiential and operational challenges that require a shift to a collaborative approach which fosters the new ways utilizing methods and requires expanding perspectives. Therefore, service design within the healthcare sector gets increasingly important. It increases the need for understanding complexity, since healthcare systems and subsystems can always be called complex. Traditionally, service design and complexity has been framed by a wicked problem approach which has been a great description of complexity situations and the need for adapting to wicked problems when designing. Therefore, this article starts with a recommendation of five mindsets in service design before it explores the value of service design drawing from interdisciplinary knowledge when unraveling healthcare systems. An interdisciplinary exploration of complex systems, considering the various thinking schools, adds fundamentally to the framework to understand emergency departments within hospitals and healthcare systems and shows what service design can contribute to such healthcare systems. The second part of the paper follows a research and design process, looking at a healthcare system using service design to improve the emergency department experience. Because of the deadline, the description of this application comprehends the intelligence and design phase, showing how complexity can be handled by carefully designing, enacting, and testing the mindsets presented. It shows that in complex systems like healthcare and emergency departments, service design practice needs to be done with time and care, since systems and subsystems react and present interdependencies that need to be intentionally designed.