Transforming healthcare through human-centered design: An interview with RMIT Online alumni, Bismi Jomon

Bismi Jomon, a healthcare professional with a background in IT, found value in RMIT Online's Human Centered Design course (now renamed Design Thinking for Innovation) to enhance patient care through design thinking. The course equipped her with skills to implement a groundbreaking cost-back model for data delivery in healthcare, leading to her nomination as an emerging leader. Read more on her experience studying with us.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

"I am a full-time employee for a Healthcare organisation leading a team to build a Data Warehouse so that we can help build quality patient care with high data integrity. I am in my 7th year in this role and 13 years in this organisation. My background in IT meant I lacked the human-centred design for patient care as well as customer-side empathy mapping and how to think from their side. This is the reason I joined the course."

Why did you decide to look into studying again, and why did you choose RMIT Online?

"While I was working on a project to create a cost-back model for data delivery, I didn't have many ideas on how to plan or promote that. There was a real need, but I was at a loss on how to present and analyse the different areas of this process. Our company's intranet showed RMIT Online's Human-Centred Design course, and I felt that's what I was missing. As a manager of my team, I decided that this course was what I needed. It helped me to present the model more concisely and articulate that to the team, so everyone was clear and it is deployed now in our organisation."

Since completing the course, how have you been able to apply your new learnings?

"I have implemented the cost back for the organisation for the first time in health care and people are welcoming it to get the right data set in a short time. The clarity in the process is great and more people are joining. While restructuring the teams, we brought in another team to join to improve our collaboration.

I was nominated as the emerging leader in the organisation and my team (Data Warehousing team) was nominated as a high-performance team. I am not confident that I can make changes in the organisation by changing my mindset and thought processes in a human-centred way."

Would you recommend this course? If so why?

"The empathy map and analysis tools are really useful in any professional and even personal workspace. this course has been fantastic for my career growth, and you can easily transfer these skills to any area." 

How did you balance working, social life and studying?

"The online model was really helpful, the Zoom meetings were active and at a time that I could attend. My director was very supportive as he saw my progress each week in real-time. the recordings, assessments and readings were very useful. Since I was using my real work goals as assignments, it was easier for me to put the time and effort into that."

If you're interested in using creative design thinking to develop innovative business solutions like Bismi, we offer a short course in Design Thinking for Innovation here.