Design and healthcare collaboration: Developing a generic patient decision aid in a Danish hospital context

Besides its traditional realms, today design is seen as a catalyser, a process and a way of thinking in different sectors,
organisations and business structures. In healthcare, the collaborations explore ways on how to involve patients more
actively in engaging in their own healthcare and wellbeing.
Based on the perspective of patient centred care and shared decision making, this paper focuses on a design-led
process on developing a generic patient decision aid for five different clinical tracks within a collaboration between The
Patients Cancer Hospital in Vejle and Design School Kolding in Denmark. The generic patient decision aid was developed
through an iterative process and a variety of methods such as participations in steering group meetings, interviews with
stakeholders, observations of consultations and tests for getting feedback from stakeholders.
In this paper, critical changes suggested by bottom-up and top-down interventions are taken into account, to map
out the strategies and methods used for the whole design development process. By evidence of this three-year
collaboration, we suggest a balanced encounter of top-down and bottom-up strategies as a fruitful means for future
patient centred care.