Crowdsourcing the Healthcare Crisis
Thursday, October 9th, 2008I am sometimes asked – what can cognitive design do for the healthcare industry?
The field can make big contributions to creating new programs for changing health behaviors, dramatically increasing the level of service excellence in hospitals and clinics, assisting clinicians in making decisions based on best practice and in many other ways I have blogged on before.
I see another opportunity, a potentially big one that has not be discussed before. It has been widely recognized for many years that the American healthcare system is broken.
For a great recap of the facotids rendered in video and music checkout this YouTube post. The point is we don’t have the policies, infrastructure, incentives, practices, entities and relationships in place to deliver cost effective high quality care to all Americans (and our guests from other countries). We need to design, implement and refine a “new system”. But how do we discover what that new system should be? How do we design it?
Our current approach, using a combination of the political process augmented by research from think tanks (e.g. the McCain and Obama plans) combined with limited experiments in the free-market (e.g. retail clinics, concierge medicine and consumerism) and institutional attempts (e.g. Medicare pilot programs and the 100K Lives Campaign), may not be enough to produce a good solution.
Given the stakes involved and that we have other crises in the pipeline, for example social security, we need to take steps to improve our ability to design solutions to social problems. This is where cognitive design can help.
