Fort Worth Medical Students Use Design Thinking To Find Solutions For Future Patients

FORT WORTH – Medical students at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University are using design thinking to come up with solutions for real-world medical problems.

Future Accelerators of Medicine and Beyond (FAB) is an immersive curriculum that exposes medical students to emerging concepts that may have a significant impact on the delivery of health care during their career. Throughout four separate weeks, FAB introduces forward-thinking topics such as artificial intelligence, genomics, assays of the future and design thinking.

The innovative FAB curriculum is a way to embrace creativity in medicine, according to Emma Butler, MS-1 at Burnett School of Medicine at TCU.

“I didn’t realize how much I loved design thinking,” Butler said.

The first week of FAB is where the medical students use design thinking to focus on patient and provider needs while also prioritizing empathy. One of the mantras of the medical school is teaching students how to put patients at the center of everything they do.

This is an opportunity for them to do something different while still learning medicine, added Stacy Grau, Ph.D., Director of Idea Factory at TCU Neeley School of Business.

“They all start with the same design challenge but it’s really interesting to see how deep each team goes into a certain area of medicine,” Grau said.

The medical students begin the week with a design sprint and an introduction to design thinking. They are put into eight different groups and tasked with creating a medical device or application for users of any age.

The challenge from Grau’s team at the Idea Factory to the medical students was to create something to improve health and fitness for a patient group of their choice. The students selected a wide range of groups for their projects such as children, former athletes with injuries, pregnant women, adults 70 and older and more.

The students spent the early part of the week in the Fort Worth community interviewing patients.

Butler’s team created a virtual reality headset for older adults experiencing chronic migraine headaches or ADHD symptoms. The headset would send visual and technical data to health care providers giving them a first-person view into what the patient is experiencing.

It’s an opportunity for the physician to be able to walk in the patient’s shoes, Butler added.

“One common theme we saw was that the patients don’t really understand why other people don’t get what they are going through,” Butler said.

The VR headset would also be equipped with different programs to help relieve migraines as an alternative to taking medications.

“For migraines, you can have a completely dark and encapsulating sound deficit you can use instead of having to take your onset medication, which can often make you tired and you can’t go about your daily living activities after taking them,” Butler said.

All of the groups met with the Idea Factory team afterwards in multiple ideation sessions before their final presentations, in poster form, at the end of the week.

“The posters they created really represent a prototype of their idea and what problem they are trying to solve and who they are trying to solve it for,” Grau said.

These are additional tools they can use as physicians on top of their medical knowledge, Grau added.

“Our mission at the medical school is to create Empathetic Scholars® and this really crystalizes that from an innovation perspective,” Grau said.