This is the first in a series of three articles looking at the future of design for the patient experience.

What to expect when...

You need a joint replacement. Or your dad had a stroke. Or your six-year-old was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. 

Can you expect your care team to provide information that will help you to understand your condition? How will you know if something is wrong and you should seek help? How do you know what to ask your loved one's caregiver? What do other people do in your situation?

It’s well known that patients stay healthier when they are informed. Health literacy is key; if you are not able to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services, you will be ill-equipped to make decisions regarding your own or the health of your loved ones.

Patient education plays an important role in a number of Involution designs. Here are a few resources we’ve found.

AMA Atlas of the Human Body

Illustration: Leslie Laurien, MSMI

The American Medical Association (AMA) has been a leader in addressing health literacy and patient safety and offer a number of health literacy educational tools.

Park Nicollet Hip and Knee Replacement Care Guide

One feature of this guide that we really like is that the first page, even before the Table of Contents, addresses the questions “When do I call my doctor?” and “When do I call 911?”

drawMD from Visible Health

drawMD enables clinicians to simplify and explain medical concepts visually, customizing in real time in coversation with a patient. 

This week’s highlights

On Wednesday we concluded the six-week series on UX Maturity with The AI of UX. If you missed any of these or want to read them through again, see parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Around the Studio: Continuing Efforts in Open Government provides a look at how the City of Asheville, NC has launched an online visual financial tool based on the work of Arlington Visual Budget.

You already know that it’s Friday, right?

So why waste valuable character space and SEO just to state the obvious? Starting now, we’ll still give you a quick run-down of the week’s articles and share a few of our latest web finds. We just won't tell you that it’s Friday.

It’s a busy time of year, full of demands and distractions. How to stay healthy, focused, and happy?

Get Enough Sleep

What sleep deprivation does to your brain, in one stunning infographic put together by GE and Mic for BrainMic.

Take a Nap

The folks at Mic are ready to help fight that sleep deprivation by telling you how to take the perfect nap. Really, with scientific evidence to back it up.

As the news has spread in all directions we have discovered that the 2014 Ebola outbreak represents not only a healthcare crisis with global impact, but also an information crisis. Even highly respected news outlets can have conflicting information on a single event, so that the stories are confusing and hard to trust. Hours spent poring over the NIH and CDC and WHO sites revealed the common threads of truth, but the details were scattered. There was no straightforward way to get a complete picture.

So, we decided to create a single source of graphical information that could become an international resource. Something that could compliment the Wikipedia page. Clean lines, a classic readable font, with unambiguous colors and icons. Headers in black and white, red for critical information, gray text to let pictures do the talking. Easy to scan and locate the topics before reading closely for details.

The team at Involution Studios — made up of Sarah Kaiser, Jane Kokernak, Kelly Mansfield, Harry Sleeper, and Juhan Sonin — created the Health Axioms card deck over an eight-month period. Starting with a dozen core, personal health habits, they turned these initial ideas into short catch phrases. Sarah and Kelly drew hundreds of sketches, which often drove the name and card story.

The creative process started with sketches of different concepts for each Health Axiom.

Next, Jane honed the narrative, based on research, and edited each axiom story arc. Throughout this iterative process of conceptualization and refinement, the team continued to brainstorm more ways — big and small — to influence health and life, incorporating those insights into the deck.