“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it” — Maimonides (12th century scholar and physician)

The following should not be news to you, but it’s sometimes easy to forget: Patients aren’t just lines in a spreadsheet, records in a CRM system, or the list of ailments in their medical records. They are people.

Garden on the Go® is an obesity-prevention effort initiated by Indiana University Health. This year-round, mobile, produce-delivery program provides fresh, affordable vegetables and fruit to Indianapolis neighbourhoods in need.

How do service designers keep their concepts intact while moving from a strategic level to implementation? This article describes the key factors that made it possible to enact large strategic changes in a conservative field.

With the accelerating pace of life and rising work pressure, a growing number of Chinese citizens are confronted with health issues. The patients suffering from chronic diseases and cancer tend to be younger, which is especially obvious in the larger cities in China.

Today, patients have more information than ever before about their diseases and treatment options. Think about the wealth of data on the online community PatientsLikeMe, where more than 220,000 patients share their stories about over 2,000 conditions and Patient.co.uk, which has 16 million visits each month.

A typical phenomenon for many rural villages in southwest China is that young adults have moved into town to seek higher income jobs, leaving their aged parents and children behind. This change in family structure has caused far-reaching effects to all aspects of village life.

Many young people are today suffering from ‘physical activity allergy’, a condition that is proliferating due to new digital lifestyles. The media refer to sedentary lifestyles as ‘the new smoking’, which is having disastrous effects on our health. Hence, there is an urgent need for targeted research into interventions that promote physical activity.

Public health service is a complex and highly specialised discipline, which has made it a tough nut to crack in terms of effective service design.

Across the world, there is a realisation and understanding that existing healthcare systems will not deliver what the future requires.

Community health workers (CHWs) are often referred to as the ‘last mile’ of healthcare delivery in resource-challenged communities around the globe, but while their impact and value has been widely proven, their crucial role is still often questioned by the larger healthcare system.

North American universities have proactively supported student mental wellness, to facilitate their educational mission to successful graduation.

In the life of a hospitalised child, each day brings different challenges, hopes and fears. However, once a day, something unique happens: a team of physicians, residents, medical students, nurses and specialists visit the child’s room.

M4ID is a Helsinki-based social enterprise whose mission is to reduce social inequalities and improve access to health care in low-resource settings through innovative communication and service design.

For most organisations, designing touchpoint experiences that resonate with customers and communicate their brand is a costly endeavour. Yet, differentiation does not necessarily have to be expensive.

The advent of mobile research provides radical new opportunities in the field of user research. Smartphones allow us to capture data that is both real-time richer in content, bringing us closer to the moments when and where experiences actually happen.

You can find a home for service design in existing research in health, if you know where to look.

The growing interest in service design calls for specific education programs, at a moment in which the framework for the discipline itself is still under construction.

In this issue, editor Jesse Grimes interviews Geke van Dijk and Bas Rainmakers and learns about their involvement in service design networks, their Anglo-dutch company STBY, and design research.