Using Human-Centered Design Methodology to Maximize the Impact of Hospice and Palliative Care Research (ME303)

Outcomes 1. Participants will be able to define and develop a sequence of human-centered design (HCD) activities to better engage a diverse and multidisciplinary team throughout the research process.2. Participants will be able to plan and facilitate introductory-level HCD activities with their own research teams.Human-centered design (HCD) is a structured, yet highly participatory process for problem-solving and system design that prioritizes people's needs and experiences. As high-impact hospice and palliative care research increasingly becomes a multidisciplinary team- based endeavor, HCD methodology offers a promising approach for enhancing research teams’ collaboration, innovation, and productivity. For example, HCD has been used to engage community partners in developing caregiver-focused psychosocial interventions and to generate manuscript ideas from an advance care planning comparative effectiveness trial. As HCD implementation becomes more common, discussion of how to incorporate HCD best practices into hospice and palliative care research is needed. In this workshop, we will use a combination of didactics and interactive small groups to teach participants how they could utilize HCD methods to enhance their research team's collaboration and creativity.Investigators with diverse expertise and experiences in applying HCD in hospice and palliative care research will facilitate this workshop. Using a brief didactic format, we will review HCD's guiding principles, benefits of integrating HCD into research, issues researchers should consider in planning HCD sessions, and common pitfalls to avoid. For example, we will discuss session characteristics (e.g., number of participants, duration) and approaches for selecting HCD activities. We will also review resources for HCD training, planning, and facilitation.Attendees will then separate into small groups and participate in a facilitated HCD activity. Activities will feature applications of HCD in various hypothetical research scenarios: (1) refining a lay navigator intervention for caregivers of adults with dementia, (2) selecting patient-centered outcomes for an ICU shared decision-making intervention, and (3) identifying secondary research questions from an advance care planning trial with a multidisciplinary research team. Moderators will review sequences of HCD activities (“recipes”) commonly used to address their small group's goal and then facilitate a live HCD activity. For example, one group will engage in “Important-Difficulty Matrix,” an activity that can be used during study design to prioritize potential patient-centered outcomes by balancing an outcome's perceived importance with the difficulty of measuring it. The session will close with each group sharing their activity's output, followed by open discussion/questions.