Human-centered design provides a framework to understand the needs of patients and clinicians who are the target of goals-of-care discussion priming tools. Few studies employ human-centered design to develop and refine their tools.

To describe how human-centered design can be applied to the development and refinement of clinician- and patient-facing inpatient goals-of-care discussion guides (Jumpstart guides).

Human-centered design was applied to the development and refinement of the inpatient Jumpstart guides in 4 phases: (1) discovering problems based on prior pilots, studies, and research team priorities; (2) further defining problems based on stakeholder and expert review of the current guides; (3) designing solutions based on consensus among stakeholders; and (4) validating solutions after research team review of stakeholder comments.

Five initial problems were identified by the research team in phase 1. After expert and stakeholder review in phase 2, 30 additional problems were identified related to Jumpstart guide format, structure, and content. In phase 3, stakeholders proposed solutions to these 35 problems and reached consensus on 32 of these. There was disagreement in 3 areas, including how to frame discussions around cardiopulmonary resuscitation and 2 perceived barriers to inpatient goals-of-care discussions. In phase 4, the research team reviewed all stakeholder input and reached final consensus on solutions to all of the identified problems.

Human-centered design is a useful tool for enhancing communication interventions in serious illness and can easily be integrated in future development and refinement of clinician- and patient-facing interventions to enhance goals-of-care discussions.