Clinical Innovation for VA office of Research

Overview:

Research at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) serves millions of Veterans and their families by creating technologies, products, and therapies that address the myriad and specific health challenges facing Veterans. The Veteran Health Administration is the largest integrated health care system in the United States providing care at 1,298 health care facilities and serving over 9 million Veterans.

The goal of this work was to support ORD’s four strategic pillars:

1. increasing Veterans' access to high-quality clinical trials;

2. increasing the real-world impact of VA research;

3. putting VA data to work for Veterans; actively promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion;

4. Building community through VA research

Process:

From a design research point of view, my teams entry point was

• HMW create more clinical equity in VA research?

• HMW build community through VA research?

Over a five month period my team and I conducted 4 co-design workshops, 30 external interviews (disability advocates, prosthesis manufactures, etc), reviewed 21 secondary research sources.

In this project I lead and managed the Female Vets with limb loss research team managing junior researchers.

Methodologies:

1:1 qualitative interviews

Workshop Facilitation

Participatory Design

Journey Mapping

Experience Blueprints

Result:

The results of this work included:

• Development of Innovation toolkit to help build community with veterans through VA research

• Utilized by researchers across ORD 115 facilities nationwide

• Open resourced for any researcher to use across the VA

• Participant female vet with limb loss veteran hired to lead the initiative