Mapping patient-centered design practices and actors within stakeholder networks to reimagine healthcare

Patient-centeredness is advocated as a key ethical factor when designing healthcare artifacts, practices, and systems. Centeredness is constructed within particular cultural contexts and co-produced through performance by various actors within the encompassing system. In this paper, we seek to identify “patient-centeredness” by comparing two different ecosystems, the US and Italy, by systematically mapping cases and projects that claim to have been designed through a patient-centered approach. By systematically mapping the projects and their network of stakeholders, we developed a set of ecosystem categorizations that allowed for comparison between locations, distilling patient-centered values, projects, actors and organizations that seem to be leading patient-centered innovation. We describe how patient-centered values are embedded in real-life projects in the healthcare industry identifying exemplary cases and gaps for reimagining the future of care.