Design Thinking & The Rheumatologist

In our clinical settings, testing can best be thought of as follow-up to initiating a treatment. The real test is in knowing whether a medication or other therapy is having its intended main effect while reducing its side effects. Key to our understanding of any therapy is that there is no guarantee of its success—only a likelihood of success or not. To expand upon that a little, testing means critically listening to patients to identify what elements of the prototype have to be modified for it to work—or if we have to consider another form of prototype altogether.

This brings us back to the beginning—because design-thinking never really ends. In fact, even as soon as this redesign of The Rheumatologist is tested and implemented, we’ll continue to listen to you, our readers, and restart this cycle with deep empathy. Perhaps in the next incarnation of the redesign process, elements will change further, or remain the same, or perhaps even revert to how it was before. That’s the great thing about design—without the infusion of empathy at all stages of the process, it doesn’t quite work.

Love of The Rheumatologist

There we have it—the five stages of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. We see and encounter these stages all around us, but they are so subtle we often don’t even notice them. Throughout this process of redesigning The Rheumatologist, I’ve paid close attention to these stages and the cycles that we’ve gone through. It’s been an enlightening experience that comes out of a deeper feeling that is less described in the literature about design thinking: Love. The love of rheumatology, the love of our readers and the love of writing.

As you scan your eyes around, either on the page or online, I hope you enjoy the details as much as we enjoyed crafting them.

Bharat Kumar, MD, MME, FACP, FAAAAI, RhMSUS, is the associate program director of the rheumatology fellowship training program at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the physician editor of The Rheumatologist. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @BharatKumarMD.

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