Design for resilience

The concepts of “high-reliability organizations” and “patient experience” have become relatively common in health-care operations parlance. However, to date, there have been few scientifically based systematized methods for operationalizing these constructs in the design of systems used in the delivery of human health care. This chapter explores the construct of “resilience” and how it may be used for the identification of outcomes and controllability of systems in health-care environments. Based on the epistemologies of psychology and engineering, resilience offers a vehicle for unifying the technical performance measures of optimal user-experience with the design-dependent parameters of high-reliability performance. An adaptive capacity taxonomy, applied-use case studies, and select systems engineering tools that can facilitate bidirectional visual traceability of systems design will be presented. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how principles of resilience can be used in the analysis, conceptual development, and formation of various types of human-centered health systems.