Can Graphic Designers Shape the Future of Health Care?

Ryan Panchadsaram / Presidential Innovation Fellow

Today, when you print a medical record, it looks like a cash register receipt. The information is all there, but it is not especially patient-friendly. And if you have a complex health condition, the record can quickly become unwieldy. It’s better than carrying around paper records, for sure, but as patients and consumers, we really need a better user experience—all in an effort to help patients and their family members better manage their health care.

Graphic designers have the unique ability to take something that exists, transform it, and make it more valuable and usable. By making a patient health record more usable, designers can help to prevent medical errors, empower patients to make smart health decisions, and even save lives.

The Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are inviting graphic designers to rethink how a medical record is presented visually, making it more readable, downloadable, and easy for patients to use. So we are launching a collaborative effort to encourage designers across the country to improve the state of health care.

Graphic Design Contest on Re-imagined Health Record

Over the next six weeks, we are asking talented professionals to submit their take on a re-imagined health record. Then a panel of curators will select the best designs to exhibit in a showcase in Washington D.C. and online to inspire members of the health care industry.

The curators will pick a final design (that may combine elements of numerous designs) to be built and open-sourced on the code sharing site Github . Our objective is to build the Bootstrap for the patient health record.

With these tools, electronic health record software companies across the country should be able to:

• Integrate the final design into their products,
• Contribute to the open-source project and ultimately,
• Help to provide patients with one of the most important tools available in their own health care arsenal.

The VA enthusiastically supports the open-source development of the selected design because it may enable them to improve MyHealtheVet—their patient portal. If the final design is used by the VA, it could touch the lives of millions of veterans and their families.

The health care and design community have come together to support this graphic design contest. We are proud and thankful to have the Designer Fund, California HealthCare Foundation, Luxr, and Rock Health as partners.

For More Information

Learn how you can participate in this graphic design contest. The call for submission ends on November 30, 2012. For updates, follow @ProjectBlueBtn.

This post was originally published on the ONC HealthIT Buzz blog. It is reprinted here with permission.