Crowdsourcing the Healthcare Crisis
I 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.
I am confident that we have the know-how to design an effective (and bi-partisan) healthcare system, social security system, energy policy and the like. The challenge is how do we find that know-how and motivate it to work on the task?
Said another way, how can we design a policy innovation process that taps the “wisdom of crowds” or the massive store of American ingenuity we have at our disposal?
One possibility is to use a new model called crowdsourcing.
In this model, if you have a hard or very large problem you throw it to the crowd (using the internet) and let those best suited to solve it go after it (self select). It is a lot like outsourcing but instead of using a biding process to find the best vendor you open up to all comers. The crowdsourcing model lets anyone who is uniquely motivated and talented self-select the problems they want to work on. It is the latest way to find the best talent from the global pool.
Wikipedia used this model to build an encyclopedia. Netflix is using it to drive the sophisticated R&D needed to refine the recommendation engine on their website. And there are hundreds of more applications, including Innocentive, a marketplace designed to match up “the brightest minds with the hardest problems”.
My question is – can the US government or any other organization interested in healthcare reform use it to design a new healthcare system for America?
To make the idea work you need:
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clear criteria for what counts as a solution and other rules on how to participate
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governance or a way to decide which design wins – likely a blue ribbon industry, government, think-tank panel
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a prize of $10M (or more) to motivate the formation of serious groups to respond, much like the X-prize, revolution through competition approach.
After some initial filtering the best designs could be presented, American Idol style, so that all citizens can be brought into the conversation.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful model that has many unique features from a cognitive design standpoint. It is even being used to tackle some complex design problems. For example, it is being used to develop the design for a sustainable SUV called Kernel that holds seven people, cost less than $30K and gets 100 mpg. Step that up a few orders of magnitude and you have the healthcare design problem!
One way cognitive design can help the healthcare system is by creating a new policy innovation process that better fits how the human mind (versus political process) works. A process with little overhead, natural motivation for the best minds to work as hard as they can, exciting and something that breaks the log jam we currently have in healthcare reform.
Want to solve the healthcare problem? Let the wisdom of crowds chew it up, offer an X-prize and determine the winner American Idol style. I kid you not.
