Mapping health journeys to create meaningful and sustainable solutions for healthcare

Healthcare systems today face increasingly complex and interconnected challenges, including workforce shortages, persitent healt disparities rising medical costs, and ageing populations that affect both patients and providers. Addressing these issues requires more than policy alignment it calls for a fundamental rethinking of healtcare as e socio-technical system where people, organizations, and technology are deeply interwined. 

A systems approach integrates human behaviour, organizational stuctures, and technological innovation to design solutions that improve outcomes, promote equity, and enhance user experience. Within this framework, design plays a pivotal role by bridging social and technical dimensions, reimagining workflows, and fostering meaningful interactions between people and technology across diverse healthcare settings. 

Importantly, design is not just about creating new tools but ensuring those tools align with users' needs and the environments in which they operate. By embracing a holistic, human-centered perspective, healthcare systems can become adaptive, equitable, and sustainable, ultimately supporting both those who delive care and those who receive it. 


Curriculum

In this Master Class Human-Centered Design for healthcare, you get acquinted with different human-centered design research methods and learn how to map a health journey. Health journeys are comprehensive representations of a distributed health care system, including all actors, interactions and processes that take place in that system, as well as experiences from a patient's perspective. Health journeys allows to identify design opportunities for new product and service systems for given medical context. In addition to identifying design opportunities, a health journey provides insights into the socio-technical system within thich the new service or product-service combination needs to function. 

IDE's healthcare researcg programme and Medisign IDE Master specialisation is closely connected to the Master Class.

 

Learning Objectives

During this Master Class, you will: 

  • Create a systematic overview and better understanding of a medical context
  • Broaden your toolset for exploring and collecting the needs and experiences of patients and medical professionals
  • Gain insight in interactions, emotions and barriers for the patient and other actors
  • Learn to have a holistic approach on a medical context and viewing the problem from different perspectives
  • Indentify opportunities for new service or product-service combinations

 

Content

  • Human-centered design research methods
  • Patient participation and involvement of healthcare professionals
  • Health journey mapping
  • Many examples from IDE's healthcare research and education programme

 

Speakers

Armaĝan Albayrak is Assistant Professor in Design for Healthcare at the IDE Faculty, TU Delft. Her research focuses on designing and integrating human-centered systems within complex healthcare environments. Her work bridges design, human factors, and healthcare innovation through the development of Health Journeys, which enables a multidimensional understanding of patient and provider experiences across time, settings, and stakeholders, with the goal of improving continuity, coordination, and quality of care.

Marijke Melles is Associate Professor in Human-Centered Design for Quality of Care at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Her expertise is in the field of human factors for sociotechnical systems, in particular how design can facilitate teamwork in multi-stakeholder networks. Her main area of application is the field of healtcare focusing on inter-professional teamwork and patient participation in care networks.


Registration: https://www.tudelft.nl/io/studeren/ide-design-master-classes/registration/

Website: https://www.tudelft.nl/io/studeren/ide-master-classes/ide-master-classes-2026/healthcare-journeys