The Design Health Program is a patient-centred initiative that uncovers critical healthcare needs and brings together teams from diverse disciplines, including engineering, business, medicine, and more. The program offers an immersive learning experience where teams don’t solve pre-defined problems, but actively identify, validate, and prioritize problems that will impact human health, collaborating to develop cost-effective and accessible solutions.
In partnership with the School of Medicine and School of Nursing, members of each team gather data and insight into the clinical environment and use structured ethnography tools to identify unmet, underserved, and unarticulated needs.
Currently, the program is open to graduate students from the Pratt School of Engineering and the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences (including PhD and master's students), second-year MBA students from the Fuqua School of Business, students and trainees from the Duke School of Medicine, nurses and students from the Duke School of Nursing, as well as students from Duke Law.