An App That Tries to Predict the Future of Cities

From TheAtlanticCities  "The Harvard Graduate School of Design released the new Ecological Urbanism app last month. The interactive app, available at the iTunes store, adapts content from the GSD book of the same name, which explores how designers can unite urbanism with environmentalism. Combining data from around the world, the app "reveals and locates current practices, emerging trends, and opportunities for new initiatives" in regard to the future of cities." Imagine something like this for predicting the future of health systems and hospitals, combining measures of community health, strategic trends, financial viability, with experts from around the world adding data and context. Hmmm.

12:32 PM

If Disney Took Out Your Trash

If you’re a reasonably long-time reader of Health Care Strategist, you’ve heard me criticize health care's apparent incuriosity about the innovative world beyond some walnut-paneled boardroom.



“Not invented here. Can’t work. Let’s take it to committee. Better yet, let's form a NEW committee!  It’s too risky. Health care is different. You don’t understand - we’re a hospital, not Google! Nobody else is doing it. Why should we?”


Some of you think I’m being too hard on an industry that’s paid my bills for 25+ years. Really? Then tell me why this story is headline-worthy:

"Community Hospital Borrows Show Biz Staging."

Visit any Disney property and what you WON’T see are maintenance carts, food deliveries, trash removals or employees rushing to their job station. All that operational stuff happens behind the scenes, away from the paying public’s eyes.




Lessons from Disney

 Disney pioneered this separation of public and private spaces in the early 1960s at Anaheim’s Disneyland and a decade later on a bigger and better scale at Orlando’s Disney World. By my count that’s 50 years of very public, consumer-focused design. 50 years of lessons to be learned by anybody willing to stop, think, and ask “What if..? Why not..?”


Disney’s thinking has, quite belatedly, diffused throughout health care’s design community. Yet even today it’s sufficiently rare that projects based on this philosophy make headlines.


Ask yourself something: in 50 years, how many times have YOU vacationed in the Magic Kingdom? How many times have your colleagues, your planners and architects visited? Thousands?


And still decades passed before someone in healthcare went “Hey! Wow! What great ideas! Maybe our customers don’t want to see us moving red-bagged trash down a public corridor. And maybe patients on gurneys would rather not be gawked-at on those long elevator rides from 5-East to Radiology and back again.”


Yes, they are great ideas. Ideas that sat there in public view for decades while generations of healthcare execs went merrily along their way.  What are we walking past right now, day after day, without seeing the problem and the opportunity?  And don't answer 'nothing.' 

I think of myself as a hospital leader AND a consumer.  I seldom go anywhere without observing what works (and what doesn't.)  What I love (and what I loathe.)  The details of service and process excellence.  Sometimes that's all innovation requires - those everyday consumer experience, a little reflection, some exploration and lots of empathy. 

• "I went to Disney World and loved it...but why?" 
• "I shopped at an Apple store and loved it...but why?" 
• "I stayed at a Ritz-Carlton and was amazed...but why?" 

(The 'why's' are the most important, by the way.) 

Of course now you can read books about Disney and Steve Jobs and RItz-Carlton, no travel required.  But so can your competitors and wouldn't you rather get there first?

I suppose I should recognize progress instead of criticizing delays. After all, it’s been months since I heard a hospital bragging about the cool flat-screen TVs in their new bed tower. (As if you could buy anything else…)

3:42 PM

Your Next Health Coach May Be...

...your car.  From Edmunds Inside Line:

"Ford cars and trucks may soon be able to tell you when to take a puff on your asthma inhaler or test your blood glucose level, as the Dearborn automaker is poised to take its Sync communications system far beyond infotainment.

"The Dearborn automaker offered a tantalizing — if somewhat disconcerting — look on Wednesday at the potential for a vehicle to be your partner and coach when it comes to health and wellness.

"Ford said it was intent on demonstrating a paradigm shift in the way its Sync communications system is used. In the not-too-distant future, a car could let you know the UV index so you could apply the proper amount of sunscreen, monitor your food choices at McDonald's, or check your calendar to see whether you'll be playing sports that day and may need an extra puff or two on your asthma inhaler.

'"We're not trying to turn the car into a medical device," said Alan Hall, a Ford spokesman in a phone conversation with Inside Line. "We're a conduit for healthcare to become mobile."'

As they roll out their own health coaching strategies, do physicians and hospitals see Ford as competition? Maybe they should. And I'll bet Ford gets there first. 

Actually, turning the car into a medical device is fine with me. I'd much rather deal with my mechanic than my HMO or some clinic's wretched appointment scheduling system.  My mechanic only charges an arm and ONE leg.

7:32 AM

“He told them it was ugly and too complex..."

From The Daily News Blog: "Bio: Steve Jobs was a details man, even in his Memphis hospital bed."

"In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs that went on sale Monday, there’s some fascinating detail about Jobs’ stay in Memphis during 2009, when he got a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital’s transplant institute.

"Jobs, who died earlier this month at age 56, was ever the details man, even in his hospital bed.

"There’s a moment in the book’s recounting of Jobs’ transplant when Jobs pulled off an oxygen mask, grumbled about the design and ordered someone to bring him five different choices of masks. He said he’d pick the one he liked.

"Same for the oxygen monitor on his finger.

“He told them it was ugly and too complex,” Isaacson writes of the monitor. “He suggested ways it could be designed more simply.”

So here's a question for you:  before, during and maybe even after Jobs' hospital stay, how many hospital staffers saw those same devices - O2 masks, oxygen monitors, etc. - without spotting the obvious?  How many learned nothing, noticed nothing, simplified nothing? 

Here's another question: how many other opportunities like that are lying fallow in YOUR organization? 

Wanna bet the answer is an integer significantly above zero?  Dinner?  You're on!

(Connect with me on Twitter @whatifwhynot )

3:39 PM

Great PowerPoint Presentations: Oxymoronic?

No, but sometimes they can be rocket science as Edward Tufte shows in "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports." 

Tufte studied NASA's PowerPoint-fueled discussions as engineers struggled to assess the damage, if any, space shuttle Columbia sustained during a 2003 liftoff when a small piece of foam insulation broke off, striking the orbiter's left wing.  We all know how that story turned out.

Thankfully I'm called to deliver presentations with ideas, not lives, hanging in the balance. Still, telling a story clearly, concisely and powerfully never hurts.

6:19 AM

 Randy Lewis writing in the LA Times, discusses a little-known aspect of Steve Jobs' legacy: 

"Stevie Wonder said Thursday that he sought Jobs out late in his life to express his gratitude for matters that went well beyond what he and his company did for music.

"The one thing people aren't talking about is how he has made his technology accessible to the blind and the deaf and people who are quadriplegics and paraplegics," Wonder, 61, said. "He has affected not just my world, but the world of millions of people who without that technology would not be able to discover the world.

"His company was the first to come up with technology that made it accessible without screaming out loud 'This is for the blind; This is for the deaf.' He made it part of the actual unit itself. There was application inside the technology that allowed you to use it or not use it.

"The iPhone, iPad touch, iPod touch, all these things, even now the computer, are accessible to those who are with a physical disability," the 25-time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter and instrumentalist said."

9:36 AM