March 19, 2025
What do stickers and toothpaste have to do with good service design? Karissa Minnich, our Civic Design Manager, shares about the softer side of service delivery after a recent hospital experience.
A few weeks ago, my son got an infection, and we found ourselves in our local children’s hospital for a few days. Let me say right away–my kiddo is fully recovered, and I am forever grateful to the pediatric nurses and doctors for their care. As you can imagine, I’ve thought a lot about the gift of health and what it means to have access to quality medical care. But what I want to share is where my personal life meets my professional. Sitting in our hospital room, Pupstruction playing non-stop, I saw service design intentionality and opportunity everywhere.
Often, we focus on service design as a way to improve outcomes. And it is. Recently at The Lab, we’ve worked on questions like, how might we increase the number of students getting summer food assistance? How might we close the academic achievement gap? And how might we prevent fires in our homes and businesses?
In the case of a hospital, good service design can save lives. How do we get patients the right treatment? How do we reduce wait times in the emergency room? How do we minimize avoidable readmissions? These are deeply important questions with high-stakes outcomes. In our time at the hospital, I saw several of these designs in action:
Barcoded wristbands: To reduce the chance of my son receiving the wrong medication or dosage the hospital used an electronic medication-administration system. Every time medication was given, the barcode on my son's wristband was scanned along with the medicine to ensure a “match.” This has been standard practice for the last 20 years, and a New England Journal of Medicine study found it reduced medication errors by 41%.
Discharged with prescriptions: The nurse made sure we had medications in-hand before we were discharged. “Too many parents leave the hospital, fail to fill the prescriptions, and then return to the ER because their child’s health lapses,” the nurse told us. The hospital adjusted the discharge process–or user journey–to solve this. Parents are now asked to fill prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy before their child can be discharged.
Resourced for the return home: Before we left, the nurse reviewed a bulleted list of symptoms on the discharge paperwork; “if these happen, call 911. If these happen, call your pediatrician or the nursing team.” Instead of feeling like the only way to get support was a return to the ER or a call to 911, the hospital team gave us clear paths to get right-sized help. That not only benefits the patient, but our healthcare system. (The Lab actually worked on something similar—check out the 911 Nurse Triage program).
But there were less clinically focused outcomes that we benefited from as well. How might we make the hospital a friendly place for kids? How might we communicate honestly about when a child will receive care? How might we make a child’s caregiver physically comfortable while here? We saw these questions considered too:
Cartoons, toys, and artwork: The ER supplied a steady stream of cartoons on the waiting room TV. A cart on our ward was stocked with children’s books for the taking. Nurses doled out small prizes to patients—my son richer by two Hot Wheels, countless stickers, and a set of construction vehicles. Colorful art throughout the building set a welcoming tone.
Communicating wait times: Within minutes of arriving in the ER I had a sense of how long our wait might be. A screen projected patient ID numbers–the ones on wristbands–alongside an approximate wait time. As the day progressed, a staff person came over a loudspeaker to announce, “our current wait time is at least four and half hours.” Four and half hours wasn't what anyone wanted to hear at 7pm, but the candor gave parents information and empowered them to make an active choice about what to do next.
Showers, pillows, and fresh food: An ER vending machine with fresh sandwiches, salads, and yogurts keep us fed as lunch and dinner time passed. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap were laid out for us in our son’s room, and pillows and blankets on a couch-to-bed were there for me to get some sleep. Down the hall, a room of private bathrooms stocked with fresh towels ensured sure I got a few showers over our five-day stay.
Stickers and toothpaste don’t improve patient outcomes… except they kind of do. They make families feel seen as whole people. That builds trust in the hospital team. It expands a child’s capacity for procedures and tests. It helps a parent feel more whole, able to receive medical updates, and ask smarter questions. That is the power of good design. It shows care. It provides dignity. It focuses not just on desired outcomes, but how those outcomes are reached. When we see service delivery in these terms, we begin to see endless opportunities to keep doing better–no matter the service or the setting.
“That is the power of good design. It shows care. It provides dignity. It focuses not just on desired outcomes, but how those outcomes are reached.”
That’s the frame The Lab strives to bring to our work. It’s why we bring crayons and snacks to community conversations because we know child care is cost prohibitive for many. It’s why we hold co-design sessions in comfortable, accessible, and familiar spaces like public libraries. It’s why we consider how a change to service works for both residents and the government staff that deliver it.
The morning we were being discharged I found a mom staring bleary-eyed at the coffee machine while she told the person on the other end of her phone to pack her slippers. It was her day one. “It’s free,” I told her as I pushed the now familiar sequence of buttons so her coffee started to dispense. The credit card reader on the machine had thrown her. There’s a design opportunity, I thought.