Holistic outcome-based approach towards sustainable healthcare: aligning the system purpose through system visualisation

Presentation at Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD7) in Turin Italy. Abstract: Various stakeholders in the complex healthcare systems often prioritise and pursue different purposes, values and outcomes. Understanding/sharing/negotiating the trade-offs between them is a critical action in the development and design of complex healthcare systems. Some approaches like work domain analysis or soft systems methodology attempted to map the complex interactions, but it remains unclear how those maps and visualisations are in line with how people conceptualise in practice. This study aims to explore how designers visualise complex system interactions using healthcare outcomes to define the purpose. A workshop was conducted with 23 designers to generate outcome-based visualisations. The results indicate that designers conceptualise the purpose of the healthcare systems in different ways. Complexity was expressed through organic circles and messy arrows. However, support elements are needed to conduct open visualisations. These results may play a role in developing a visualisation-based method to address the complexity of purpose definition in healthcare.