Educational challenge: Medical education must equip future professionals with the necessary skills to navigate the complex healthcare landscape. Clinical knowledge is essential, and critical and creative thinking skills are vital to meet the challenges of the system. Design thinking offers a structured approach that integrates creativity and innovation, yet its application in medical education is absent. Solution and implementation: The compulsory MasterMinds Challenge course at Leiden University Medical Center utilizes design thinking principles to address real world healthcare challenges. Final-year medical students participated in a two-day program. The course encompassed empathizing with stakeholders, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and refining solutions. Presentation skills were emphasized, culminating in a symposium where teams showcase their outcomes. Implementation of the MasterMinds Challenge course was successful with 33 sessions delivered to 1217 medical students. Challenges covered various healthcare topics, yielding creative yet practical outcomes. Students appreciate the real world healthcare challenge, team-based approach, and the applicability of design thinking principles. Challenge owners expressed satisfaction with students’ commitment, creativity, and empathizing abilities. Lessons learned and next steps: To further enhance the MasterMinds Challenge course, a more longitudinal format is being designed, enabling greater autonomy and emphasizing the refining and implementation phases. The course can be extended to medical postgraduate professionals and interdisciplinary collaborations, fostering innovative ideas beyond current practices. By developing problem-solving skills, the MasterMinds Challenge course contributes to a future-proof medical education program and prepares students to meet the evolving needs of healthcare.

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Participatory design or co-design is defined as the active engagement of all stakeholders in a design process. However, in many co-design projects, only end users are involved. Participants are often considered as the traditional representatives of a generalized stakeholder group, without prior analysis made on each individual’s specific interest. These assumptions fail to capture opportunities for integration and satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously, which is required to design successful products in complex systems like health care. To maximize the benefit of collaboration, it is important for designers to improve understanding of the participants and their role as a stakeholder in their product’s ecosystem. This study aims to contribute to this understanding by discussing a potential visualization method that maps different stakeholders’interest in the development of new products within the health care system. The method is based on a Multilevel Design Model and was tested by means of a researchbased- modeling approach, in which several design experts where asked to map or position several design phenomena on a pre-defined template. Both the selection of the phenomena and the mapping results of the various experts where evaluated through comparison. A positive correlation was found between the type of expertise of the different experts, and their specific interest in the innovation system. This led to the conclusion that the visualisation method may prove to be a useful instrument for analysing stakeholders at different levels of institutional and nontechnical systems. Therefore, it may potentially help to manage the problem of complexity and resolve equivocality in the design process.@en

In health care, the design, development and commercialization of innovative products is often found frustrating due to the slow inefficient and difficult nature of its systems. One part of this problem is the fact that health systems are highly regulated complex systems that include various stakeholders and unique challenges. Nevertheless, designers and other innovators are
often unaware of these unique features of health systems. It is important that designers and managers are able to understand the system, anticipate challenges and account for them in their work.

We therefore aim to establish and evaluate an overarching conceptual model, which can delineate both the systems of health care innovation process and the relevant stakeholders in these systems. This paper reviews the application and potential benefits of one of the promising models called Multilevel Design Model (MDM) by employing an expert-participatory testing on multiple cases in documented clinical reports (n=8). The evaluation of the MDM model followed by further adaptations and changes to the model itself, as well as to the accompanying user guidelines. With some adjustments, the MDM was able to visualize and explain the systems of the health care innovation process in a systematic and shared manner usable for health product designers, innovators and health organizations. We propose the adjusted MDM model for further use in the design and development of health care innovations in order to avoid the typical stagnation of product dissemination after implementation.@en