New Center Launches at Emory Focused on Innovation in Acute Care
ATLANTA, GA - September 9, 2020 – Emory’s Department of Emergency Medicine is proud to announce the launch of Health DesignED: The Acute Care Design + Innovation Center at Emory.
Founded in early 2020 and embedded within the Department of Emergency Medicine, Health DesignED’s goal is to lead highly collaborative innovation that reimagines the acute care continuum and serves the needs of diverse patient populations. The center will create a network of academic, clinical, corporate, and nonprofit partners galvanizing human-centered change along the acute care continuum.
“In healthcare, the locus of innovation is often external to the people and systems that it intends to impact,” Dr. Smith says. “In order to develop meaningful, scalable solutions, we must shift to a design thinking approach, where innovation starts with understanding and engaging with the clinical environment, socio-cultural structures, and communities of providers, patients, and families.”
With a unique footprint across academic, community, and safety-net hospitals, Health DesignED will sit in a unique position, creating new models of care delivery that universally touch the lives of patients. Bringing expertise in design thinking and equitable tech enabled care, leaders at Health DesignED are “reimagining acute care that is effortless and bringing equity to wellness.”
The team aims to accomplish its early goals by focusing on three core pillars: Discovery, Engagement, and Education. They will facilitate agile environments for radical engagement and prototyping of tech enabled acute care. To date, Health DesignED has already launched two projects. Spanning the digital divide, c19check is a COVID-19 symptom checker that is accessible globally via the web and for those with limited or no internet by SMS and USSD. The team is also developing a novel virtual care model for patients utilizing emergency medical services (EMS). Emory’s pre-hospital footprint and five diverse Emergency Departments make up a network of Test Beds that the team may also be utilize to evaluate new practices and products that improve the quality and equity in patient care. Once validated, the aim is to aid in the rapid dissemination of these innovations to the populations that need them the most.
“Emergency departments have historically been a hotbed of patient-centered innovation… producing clinician innovators who are trained to adapt to medical emergencies and who create inherently agile systems,” Dr. Smith says. “The ED is a natural intersection for a range of medical specialties, community resources and diverse patient groups-positioning emergency medicine as a prime gateway for innovation and change within health systems.”
"While I am excited about where we have been and how far we have come, it is where we are going that gets my engine running,” says Dr. Wright. “We are going to be disruptive in our patient care models and create new and innovative ways that patients interface with the health care system. We created Health DesignED to completely rethink how patients access the system for acute care and how we provide the most efficient care to the patient.”
