Centralisation of pancreatic surgery has improved postoperative outcomes in several countries, yet it has also intensified the fragmentation that patients and clinicians experience when care spans expert and non-expert centres. Multiple handovers, repeated diagnostics and delays to diagnosis and treatment are recurrent consequences, compounded by inconsistent information and limited visibility of the full patient journey. To address these challenges within a regional network anchored by a pancreatic expert centre, a structured human-centred design (HCD) sprint was undertaken. Over five consecutive days, stakeholders defined a shared goal for cohesive network care and developed practical prototypes, culminating in a pilot of a real-time data-sharing dashboard. The experience illustrates how a focused design sprint can translate diverse needs into actionable solutions for more continuous, timely and patient-centred pathways.
Centralisation Drives Need for Cohesive Network Care
Pancreatic cancer care increasingly relies on distributed responsibilities. Non-expert centres often perform diagnostic workups and deliver systemic or supportive treatments, while expert centres provide treatment advice and surgery. Although this model supports better surgical outcomes, it fragments the patient experience and complicates coordination across sites. Qualitative evidence within the network highlighted miscommunication between providers and logistical frictions between hospitals as major sources of burden for patients. Clinicians also reported inconsistent messages to patients and a lack of overview of individual trajectories. At a system level, multicentre pathways were associated with repeated investigations and longer intervals to diagnosis and treatment. These findings reinforced the need for closer collaboration, standardised processes and transparent information flows across the network.
Must Read: Transforming Cancer Care Through Collaborative Home-Based Support
Against this backdrop, the sprint team defined a unifying goal: deliver pancreatic cancer network care as if in a virtual hospital with a single entrance and a single narrative. In practical terms, this meant ensuring that patient context and preferences are visible and influential at every step, that time to diagnosis and treatment is short, that satisfaction and outcomes improve and that patient information is readily accessible to patients and all involved clinicians. The team also recognised prerequisite conditions, including organisational priority, financial support, parity of expertise directed to the patient and lawful mechanisms for sharing data within national and European frameworks.
Human-Centred Design Sprint: From Empathy to Prototype
The sprint ran between 1 and 10 July 2020 at a Dutch expert centre with six affiliated non-expert centres. Stakeholders were purposively sampled to reflect key specialisms, settings and roles. The group included surgeons, medical oncologists, a gastroenterologist, a case manager, an oncology networks professor, an oncology care manager, members of an innovation team, an IT expert, a financial expert and a family member of a person with pancreatic cancer. Prior to the sprint, semi-structured interviews with patients, a family member and clinicians surfaced clear needs for better continuity and communication both between hospitals and between professionals and patients. During the sprint, an innovation specialist facilitated the work, and a Decider role ensured resolution when votes were split.
The five-day process followed established HCD phases. Empathy work mapped stakeholders, goals and barriers, then distilled “How might we” opportunities through structured voting. Definition work produced a problem statement and outcomes that emphasised a consistent pathway, uniform patient information, reduced time intervals, improved patient outcomes and stronger clinical trial inclusion. Ideation combined external inspiration and rapid sketching to converge on the most promising solution elements. Prototyping then translated these elements into a coherent patient journey and four tangible concepts: network agreements, a patient itinerary, transmural trajectory guidance and real-time data sharing across the network. The group elected to test the data-sharing component first, given its centrality to continuity and timeliness.
This approach has delivered three advantages. First, multidisciplinary participation revealed complementary perspectives on pain points and feasibility, enabling solutions that served both patients and professionals. Second, the time-boxed format was compatible with clinical schedules while still producing concrete artefacts. Third, early prototypes provided a safe vehicle for feedback, allowing iteration before larger investment.
Real-Time Data Sharing Pilot and Next Steps
The pilot centred on a dashboard prototype, CONNECT, designed to provide real-time visibility of patient information and trajectory across hospitals. Over eight weeks, three physicians in the network received access to the expert centre’s patient file via the dashboard for individuals referred to their clinics. Feedback addressed usability and value. Some users encountered friction with credentials and noted uncertainty about patient consent status for data exchange at the point of need. At the same time, clinicians reported practical benefits: advance reading of multidisciplinary team reports and consultation notes improved preparedness, reduced reliance on delayed correspondence and clarified the reasoning behind treatment decisions, thereby supporting continuity of care.
The pilot validated the concept and yielded concrete enhancements for further development, including streamlining access and making consent status more transparent. In parallel, other sprint-identified elements progressed outside the pilot. The case manager provided trajectory guidance, colleagues developed a clear patient itinerary and network-level agreements continued to be shaped. The team acknowledged that outcomes of HCD depend on stakeholder composition and group dynamics and that design methods aim to generate workable solutions rather than meet traditional criteria of reproducibility or falsifiability. Nevertheless, the sprint demonstrated that a targeted, collaborative process can produce a viable proof of concept within days, not months.
Broader context supported the chosen direction. Calls for coordinated, shared care across systems mirror the sprint’s emphasis on clarified roles and transparent information exchange. While some regions have deployed integrated platforms to facilitate communication between providers and patients, long-term effectiveness evidence remains limited, and many dashboards are still early in development. Within the network’s national setting, policy initiatives are advancing standards-based electronic data exchange and promoting easier, faster sharing of medical information. Practical implementation will need to balance interoperability, privacy, security and governance. The team observed that vendor-led solutions and open-source approaches each carry trade-offs related to adoption, sustainability and dependence, considerations that will shape future decisions about platform architecture.
An HCD sprint within a regional pancreatic cancer network produced a shared vision of a virtual hospital experience with a single narrative and rapid, coherent pathways. The process surfaced four priority levers—network agreements, a patient itinerary, trajectory guidance and real-time data sharing—and delivered a pilot dashboard that improved clinical insight across sites while highlighting usability and consent-workflow refinements. The experience underscores the value of structured co-design to translate dispersed needs into implementable tools, while recognising the importance of iterative development, legal compliance and sustained collaboration to embed solutions in routine care.
Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Image Credit: iStock
