6 Ways To Fix Health Care. People living longer. Widespread lifestyle disease like diabetes. Patients surviving cancer, strokes and heart attacks more frequently. It's big trends like these that are taxing health care systems as never before, and calling into question traditional approaches. In the future, we may need different models if we're going to keep everyone healthy without breaking the bank.
A new report from the Innovation Unit, a U.K. nonprofit that explores the future of public services, compiles innovative practices, technologies, and ideas from around the world. We picked our six favorites. Redefine Health Health care is still mostly about fixing people when they go wrong, rather than keeping them healthy. Enable Self-Management Apps, sensors, and wristbands make monitoring and managing health easier. Group Appointments The time pressure of one-on-one appointments means patients don't always take in what doctors tell them.
More Than Medicine Encourage Peer Support Incentivize Healthy Behavior. To Solve Our Health-Care Crisis, Home Treatment Needs A Makeover. Chronic disease is society's biggest health-care challenge. Even if we do a good job preventing disease by helping people live healthier lives, it's inevitable that for at least the foreseeable future, conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and depression will be our society's most substantial health-related issues. The term "chronic" is used to describe conditions that are long lasting, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that they are incredibly expensive, both financially and in terms of quality of life. (See the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Department of Health & Human Services for some striking statistics.) We must design home-care tech that integrates into people's lives. A big change to the way we help people live with these conditions could go a long way toward improving the effectiveness of our health-care system, reducing costs and improving access for everyone.
Chronic-disease care happens where people live their lives. Strategies for managing chronic disease. One Fix For Health Care: Dissolving The Barrier Between Patients And Pharmacists. Having long been a fan of early, and dumb, comedies, I am quite familiar with the “dope slap.” It was perfected by Moe Howard but employed by many before and since. A Google-searched definition describes a dope slap as the physical equivalent of "Whatta you, a moron?! " Its purpose is to slap some sense into a person quickly (or if your technique is on par with Moe’s, several people at once) who can obviously use an instant jolt of common sense. While I haven’t thought about the dope slap in quite some time, it came to mind recently when looking at some common “what were you thinking?” Practices in health care. Despite the completely foreign setting, most memorable was the fact that such an extended conversation took place.
Revelation. How obvious is it that my pharmacy in the U.S. is so different and in many ways vastly inferior to that found in many ancient traditional cultures. For reasons I cannot explain, my pharmacist is stationed behind a glass partition. 5 Storytelling Concepts That Health Care Firms Are Using To Change Patient Behavior. With the introduction of Timeline a few weeks ago, Facebook emphasized the importance of life stories in human interaction.
This interface taps into the way that people innately understand their own lives with a narrative structure that allows users to express a whole identity, rather than a fragmented view of events and photos. Timeline is just one example of how companies can tap into the power of narrative to communicate with customers on a meaningful level. Recently, my team found inspiration in an unlikely source: health care. The USC Body Computing Conference 5.0 highlighted organizations that are blurring the lines between medicine and entertainment to change how consumers view their health. I asked Karten Design’s resident storyteller, Anne Ramallo, to expand on what our designers and researchers took away from the event. *** When I attend medical conferences and events, I’m always inspired by the breadth of technology on the near horizon.
Conflict Characters Setting Resolution. 5 Steps To Designing A Better Health Care System. If you want to know what’s ailing the U.S. health care system, just ask the person next to you. Chances are, she’ll have a personal horror story to share about outlandish costs, inaccessibility of care, the regulations strangle on innovation, the battery of tests that physicians order out of fear of lawsuits, and on and on. The goal of the Healthcare Experience Design Conference (HxD) held in Boston recently was less about dissecting these problems and more about how we can start solving them.
In the keynote address, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park called on designers to participate in a “self-propelled, open ecosystem of innovation.” The conference, in its second year and organized by Mad*Pow and Claricode, brought together voices from the health care and design industries to grapple with big ideas in health care. 1. If we’re dealing with food, we should involve not only the farmer and the concerned parent but the industrial food producer as well. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Ideo’s Fix For The Upcoming Health-Care Enrollment Blitz. Paperwork is a pain, and largely becoming a thing of the past. With the passage (and upholding) of the Affordable Care Act, almost 40 million Americans are anticipated to go online for health care needs come January 2014. The California Health Care Foundation, along with a coalition of nine public and private organizations, enlisted Ideo to create an exchange--or online interface--that will simplify the intimidating, overwhelming, and labyrinthine process of exploring options and signing up.
As ever, Ideo applied its signature human-centered approach to Enroll UX 2014. The team talked to people on all sides of the federal poverty line to “establish empathy” for those who will be bringing their disparate backgrounds to the table. The result actually represents a huge opportunity for states that extends beyond this particular bill. (H/T PopSci) [Image: Novitech/Shutterstock] A Better Way to Health Care Reform: Is There a Designer in the House? As I watch the debate over health care reform, I've begun to see clearly how designers can create a solution that wouldn't be such a bitter pill for so many and would help quiet the level of disagreement currently being experienced by so many. Here's how my plan would work. A top-tier design "dream-team," comprised of members from our industry's leading firms would be brought in by the administration to fully leverage their ability to understand the range of complex issues and transform them into meaningful, relevant "experiences.
" Market segments would be profiled and personas constructed of not only patients, but health care providers, insurers, and other industry participants. While these personas would initially review demographic market compositions, they would go deeper, identifying pleasure and pain points of various health care experiences. Day-in-the-life and week-in-the-life scenarios would help us uncover previously overlooked elements of the problem.
The Future of Health Care Is Social. Health care is a personal issue that has become wholly public--as the national debate over reforming our system makes painfully clear. But what's often lost in the gun-toting Town Hall debates about the issue is a clear vision about how medicine could work in the future. In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies. You can join the conversation too: this Thursday October 8 at noon eastern, frog will hold a discussion about the future of health care on Twitter (follow the hash tag #futureofhealthcare).
Too busy to be healthy Susan's life is full. Susan is not alone. Networked devices + connected people = healthier communities Written by: More health care coverage. Health care. Health care reform. Public health. The Future of Health Care Is Social [slideshow] A Better Way to Health Care Reform: We Need an Information Design S.W.A.T. Team. Long before the "town brawls", "grass roots vs. Astro-Turf," and "death panels" became the three rings of the health care media circus, an op-ed piece appeared in the Washington Post positing that the U.S. health-care system was critically ill. The diagnosis? Terminal Information Design. The article ran on January 2006 and was written by Leslie Smolan, a designer and co-founder of our agency.
It described her disastrous experience dealing with the Medicare system while tending to her father, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after a fall. However, it also brought to light a fundamental problem inherent in our country's health care system. Entitled "My Designer Prescription for Medicare Ills," Smolan's article exposed the plague of bad information design that grips our system and bewilders even the highly intelligent. And then Smolan prescribes treatments based on successful models that exist in the commercial sector: Take a look at your year-end American Express statement.