Wellness Center for Youth with Chronic Conditions
A healthcare system design for acute care doesn't work very well for children and adolescents who are chronically ill. They will likely never be cured--rather they will carry their illnesses into adulthood. Many will develop secondary morbidities as they age, adding to their already complex medical needs.
The Wellness Center for Youth with Chronic Conditions offers a transformative approach to pediatric care. It takes a life course perspective aiming to optimize the future health of yount patients with a service platform delivery important ancillary care that is not systematically provided at UCSF.
Service designers from the Clinical Innovation Center partnered with Dr. Emily von Scheven, MD, MAS to lead an extended team of patients, caregivers, UCSF physicians and clinicians, and community providers through a human-centered design process to co-create this de novo Wellness Center. It is scheduled to open in Summer 2024.
A service platform centers around eight domains of wellness, supporting facets of health living to thrive.
These domains frame support services and programs offered by the Center. Patients also develop important health and life skills through their participation in these services and programs.
Patients receive a welcome packet in advance of their initial intake visit. The packet contains an introduction to the wellness domains and a set of interactive tools. The tools are designed to both spark patients' thinking about wellness and to prompt them to share information about themselves in preparation for the initial wellness conversation.
The wellness conversation is a unique feature of the Wellness Center. Instead of viewing the interaction as a variation of a medical Q & A, driven by the provider, the design team wanted to reinforce the experience of a two-way conversation.
The wellness navigator uses the contents of the interactive tools to guide the conversation and in the process establish a rapport for future interactions.
This challenged the team to balance the operational requirements of a typical medical encounter which is very mechanistic, and the organic character of the wellness conversation.