Human-Centered Design to Create an Emergency Care Action Plan for Children With Medical Complexity

Human-centered design (HCD) is rooted in building trust with end users by developing empathetic understanding of key partners' needs, continuous engagement, and iterative solution creation and refinement. One of the core tenets of HCD in health care is that consistent end-user engagement will result in better health outcomes. Children with medical complexity (CMC), a subset of children and youth with special health care needs, are characterized by multiple chronic health care conditions and high health care use, including emergency department visits. To address the known challenges with providing high-quality care for CMC in emergency settings, emergency information forms are currently recommended to provide insights into existing health complexities at the point of care. However, these forms have faced significant implementation challenges that lead to limited stakeholder buy-in and lack of incorporation into current emergency care workflows. We present HCD as a strategy to aid in the creation and optimization of an emergency care action plan (ECAP) for CMC. The objectives of this communication are, therefore, as follows: (1) to demonstrate HCD as an accessible approach to delineate and address pediatric care challenges within a complex health care system and (2) to illustrate a commonly used HCD methodological approach to address implementation challenges of an emergency care planning tool through the creation of an ECAP for CMC.