Click on the image below or here to see the video and my commentary on Rory Sutherland’s TEDxOxford talk on Charitable Yield Management. (Note: This post is partly a test of Pinterest-as-blogging-platform – go ahead: laugh at me for playing around with the shiny-new.)
Source: youtube.com via Health on Pinterest
Depending on how this test goes, I’ll update you how Pinterest might work.
- Phil
People with diabetes are not “diabetics”.
People with schizophrenia are not “schizophrenics”.
People with diseases are not their diseases.
Language influences our perceptions of reality.
When healthcare professionals speak like this, they run the risk of contaminating their assessments, communications and treatment implementations.
When people who have diseases refer to themselves as diseases, they too run the risk of confining who they are to what they have.
Please don’t confuse having with being.
- Phil Baumann
Riffing on Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – I offer one ‘law’ for Healthcare Technology:
Any sufficiently advanced Healthcare technology is *indistinguishable* from natural healing.
Think about this.
When you take technology to its ultimate end-point – in terms of what it is we want the technology to do – we aught to *want* the care to either be natural healing or indistinguishable from it.
This requires a different kind of thinking about what health care aught to be.
This perspective does *not* mean abandoning technology. No, not at all. It means that our technologies must become so seamlessly woven into your natural origins that we return healing to its true home.
We have become accustomed to certain ways of doing things and of thinking about problems and their solutions.
Technology permeates health care – and for good reasons.
But: we must never forget the original purposes of medicine and nursing and other processes: to heal.
“Heal” is rooted in “whole”.
As the ancient Romans would say:
Naturam expellas furca, tammen usque recurret.
…incuding me.
But I at least apply critical thinking. Here’s how I arrive at my (alterable) conclusions:
Chris Brogan is full of it. (But he’s cool, and isn’t afraid to keep learning and sharing.)
Brian Solis is full of it.
Altimeter Group is full of it. No, really – they are truly full of it.
Jeremiah Owyang isn’t full of it…he just doesn’t know what’s going on. <rant>I’m not kidding here – and, although it may seem unkind of me, I’m passionate about this stuff for the right reasons and I’m saddened that guys like this are paid to mislead the world. I don’t care if I’m shunned for saying this. I have character.</rant>
You name all the big names and…yep: they’re full of it.
That’s OK. …Unless…
…unless clients are getting ripped off or the public believes in un-vetted guesses by people who are full of it but too arrogant to say “I’m full of it”.
Everybody is full of it. You too.
And I’m completely full of it.
Which is to say: come here, say Hi to me on Twitter and elsewhere, listen to what I say and process what I’m getting at, and…
…and, most importantly:
…think this stuff through on your own (try my twelve-step algorithm or whatever).
…think this stuff through on your own.
…think this stuff through on your own.
Question everything. Believe nobody.
Especially @HealthIsSocial or @PhilBaumann because you’ll never be quite certain who is whom.
- Phil
484-362-0451
Here’s a brief video explaining why we have a QWERTY keyboard layout on all of our computer devices, including touch-screens. It also explains a lot about the sticky-ness of outdated thinking and processing in Healthcare.
It’s very easy to get trapped in outmoded ways of thinking. Very easy.
Costly too.
- Phil
Note: This is a kick-starter post. More posts to follow on this theme of bringing marketable ideas to life.
Healthcare economics is a strange animal. Most often, traditional free-market approaches don’t work – they aren’t linear; ultimate buyer and seller are removed in time and space; and, from a game theory perspective, the number of players exceeds two (payors, vendors, regulators, etc.).
I have no doubt in mind that we can do WAY better in generating, building and manifesting remarkable advances in healthcare. But we are SO not where we can be. And this is largely due to the strange nature of healthcare economics.
So: What to do?
First – Remember that innovations are the things that work in markets. Ideation/daydreaming is not innovation.
Second – Intellectual Property (IP) rights exist to ensure hard work is rewarded…BUT, they are in practice only a small part of the collective incentive, creation and production ecosystem. Meaning: IP rights need reform that maintain their original intent while boosting the other parts of the entire ecosystem. Neologisms?: Creative Rights, Production Rights? (Just thoughts.)
Third – The traditional gaps among inventors, investors and healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses, scientists, etc.) have long been costly inefficiencies. *This* is where today’s media comes into play: networked collaboration, idea generation, follow-up, etc.
There are Fourths, Fifths, Sixths…But we need a new working model that starts with the basics.
So here’s one of the (hundreds of) practical tips I have in mind: Continue to create conventions of “entrepreneurs” and investors who don’t understand Healthcare as sufficiently as they require, with those that do (physician and nurse leaders and others).
RockHealth (an accelerator) is close. And Intellectual Ventures has a similar model I have in mind across multiple verticals.
But just having a few of these ecosystems is not enough.
We need many more.
And: We need an “API” for Healthcare ventures.
More on that later.
- Phil
484-362-0451
All of the right diagnostics.
All of the right drugs infusing.
All of the right patient information available at the tips of fingers.
A clean white room with a hologramic entertainment center floating above the bed in Fowler’s.
Suple nanobots coursing through the veins, silently tweeting news of infection to other nanobots silently blocking the intruders.
A glittering scene of everything going right. Not much need for muscular lifting nor delicate palpation.
And there she lie – the tiny machinery propounding rhythmic streams of morphine to tame her breathing.
All her systems slow to their stop according to the symphony of medical algorithms.
All those electrons heralding memories of her fist kiss, her first loss, her first child…all just frost on a winter tree of dendrites.
If you were here now – like an invisible beetle in this room – you would see her as a pure-white statue: a once-living human being, given a loving death among the glittering technology, not a single person beside her in the pulsing glow.
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