Patient-centered healthcare service development: a literature review

Abstract

Patient centred services and patient experiences have increasingly been related to service quality and efficiency of care. As a way to have patient centred services, healthcare organizations started involving patients in service improvement. Proper service design is another factor that influences service quality. Healthcare services, however, have presented issues in this aspect. Human Centred Design approaches can be a way for healthcare organisations to properly design services and deliver patient centred care. In this paper, we investigate through a literature review, what methods have been used to design or improve healthcare services and how they contributed to patient centred care. With literature analysis, we identified that Service Design, co-design and other design related approaches were used to bring patient participation, and highlighted improvements and barriers involved in their use. Although these processes faced some barriers, they had positive effects to services being patient centred, improving patient satisfaction and care. Despite the effort of using structured approaches to patient participation and service improvement, the organizations might still be (re)designing their services with inadequate processes.