The Design Health Program is a patient-centered initiative that uncovers critical healthcare needs and brings together teams from diverse disciplines. The program offers an immersive learning experience where teams don’t solve pre-defined problems, but actively identify, validate, and prioritize problems that will impact human health, collaborating to develop cost-effective and accessible solutions. In partnership with the Pratt School of Engineering, Fuqua School of Business, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Law, the School of Medicine, and the School of Nursing, members of each team gather data and insight into the clinical environment and use structured ethnography tools to identify unmet, underserved, and unarticulated needs.

Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON) Associate Professor Ryan Shaw, Ph.D., RN, FAAN serves as the DUSON liaison in the partnership and said this is the only program in the country that includes nurses or is affiliated with a nursing school. Eric Richardson, Ph.D., director of Duke Design Health and associate professor of the practice, Biomedical Engineering, said the first four months of the program involve deep immersion in a clinical environment where the teams create real-world solutions to improve patient care that have not yet been addressed by performing design ethnography. 
Ethnography can serve as a method to identify contextual barriers and opportunities in health care environments. An ethnographic record can illuminate cultural logics that drive care delivery and health related behaviors. Shaw said this may highlight health inequalities and can provide insight into opportunities to design products and devices that serve diverse patient populations.

“As a team, students then generate solutions and concepts to meet these clinical needs. Students engage in prototyping products and business models, and learn the basics of intellectual property, regulatory, clinical, and manufacturing strategies,” Shaw said. Then the students refine and test the solution, and create business strategies to deploy the product into the market.

Nursing students participating enroll in Design Health 1, 2 or 3 which are designed and hosted at the Pratt School of Engineering. Upon successful completion of courses, students are presented with a Design Health Certificate. One of the values of the program is it leads to the development of thought leadership in innovation training where students will be involved in medical device development and evaluation. Because of the collaboration and focus of the program, Design Health is well on its way to becoming recognized as the premier graduate educational program in interdisciplinary medial technology innovation.

Since 2018, more than 150 students have been, more than 10 provisional patents were developed, more than six design competition awards received, and even a company was born, iSolace. Richardson said the goal of the program is to teach the process of innovation, so success looks different for each participant. While some choose to start companies, many go and work for established companies. “Many of our clinicians take the training into their clinical practice. We hope that they can identify opportunities for innovation as they practice, and then recommend solutions to their organization or outside companies,” Richardson said.