Why circular design is essential for better healthcare

At Philips, we believe that, from the outset, circular design needs to be a discussion between all stakeholders across the end-to-end value chain - not only (product) designers, engineers and marketeers, but also business model designers, finance, production, etc.

Essential to this discussion is the voice of our healthcare customers, governments and industry partners. Together with them, we leverage Design Thinking methodologies to Co-create solutions that are tailored specifically to the challenges facing our customers, as local circumstances and workflows are key ingredients in the successful implementation of solutions. In these Co-create sessions, customers often ask us for guidance: 'How do I become a sustainable health system? How can you, as our industry partner, help us reach our regional carbon targets? I need to be resilient, how do I build back green?'

To answer these questions, and help our customers make sustainable choices, we are developing 360° sustainability assessments. These are intended to help health systems optimize patient flow management and so reduce resource usage and unnecessary waste - minimizing their environmental footprint and improving the financial bottom line. The assessments address all aspects of care: clinical, operational, technological, and patient and staff experience, for both existing/renovation and new-build healthcare environments.

One example of teaming up with customers and suppliers to design a circular or 'closed cycle' system is our partnership with Jackson Health System for an Enterprise Monitoring as a Service (EMaaS) model. Unlike traditional business models where a hospital purchases and owns the patient care monitoring system and is responsible for ongoing upgrades across its network, this model keeps the ownership with Philips, including all current and future hardware, software, and networking solutions. The customer pays a per-patient fee.