World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20, 1202, Genève, Switzerland.
University of Minnesota School of Public Health, 420 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
BMC Public Health. 2020 Dec 9;20(1):1896. doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-10006-x.
Design thinking allows challenging problems to be redefined in order to identify alternative user-center strategies and solutions. To address the many challenges associated with collecting and reporting data during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, we used a design thinking approach to build the Global Ebola Laboratory Data collection and reporting system.
We used the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. This approach offers a flexible model which focuses on empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. A strong focus of the methodology includes end-users' feedback from the beginning to the end of the process. This is an iterative methodology that continues to adapt according to the needs of the system. The stages do not need to be sequential and can be run in parallel, out of order, and repeated as necessary. Design thinking was used to develop a data collection and reporting system, which contains all laboratory data from the three countries during one of the most complicated multi-country outbreaks to date. The data collection and reporting system was used to orient the response interventions at the district, national, and international levels within the three countries including generating situation reports, monitoring the epidemiological and operational situations, providing forecasts of the epidemic, and supporting Ebola-related research and the Ebola National Survivors programs within each country.
Our study demonstrates the numerous benefits that arise when using a design thinking methodology during an outbreak to solve acute challenges within the national health information system and the authors recommend it's use during future complex outbreaks.
设计思维可以重新定义具有挑战性的问题，以确定替代的以用户为中心的策略和解决方案。为了解决在 2014 年几内亚、利比里亚和塞拉利昂爆发埃博拉期间收集和报告数据方面遇到的许多挑战，我们使用设计思维方法构建了全球埃博拉实验室数据收集和报告系统。
我们在几内亚、利比里亚和塞拉利昂使用了斯坦福大学哈索·普拉特纳设计学院提出的五阶段设计思维模型。这种方法提供了一种灵活的模型，侧重于同理心、定义、构思、原型制作和测试。该方法的一个重点是从一开始就收集最终用户的反馈。这是一种迭代方法，会根据系统的需求不断进行调整。这些阶段不需要按顺序进行，可以并行、无序地运行，并根据需要重复进行。设计思维被用于开发一个数据收集和报告系统，该系统包含了三个国家在迄今为止最复杂的多国疫情之一期间的所有实验室数据。该数据收集和报告系统用于指导三个国家的地区、国家和国际各级的应对干预措施，包括生成情况报告、监测流行病学和运营情况、预测疫情、支持每个国家的埃博拉相关研究和埃博拉国家幸存者计划。
我们的研究表明，在疫情期间使用设计思维方法解决国家卫生信息系统中的急性挑战会带来许多好处，作者建议在未来的复杂疫情中使用这种方法。
