Archives For health innovation

Inspiration for Innovators: OpenIDEO and Grameen

April 4, 2013 — Leave a comment

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In 2011, OpenIDEO launched a social business challenge focused on improving the lives of people living in places like Caldas, Colombia, where one in four people live in extreme poverty. During the challenge, The Grameen Creative Lab provided local insights by interviewing the community on the ground, and the global OpenIDEO community shared innovative lessons and examples from the health sector.

The winning ideas were taken up by a local doctor and entrepreneur named Jorge García. Jorge formed a business plan based on them and received funding to found a social business in Caldas called Bive. He has been prototyping ideas from the challenge starting with one called ‘Madre Cuidadora.’ This concept creates a network of community ‘mothers’ who are trained in basic health promotion and prevention. Using these skills they resell basic health products, provide trusted advice, and offer health checks biannually.

Bive has seen impressive growth. They already have 700 users in two cities and aim for 6000 this year. Jorge and his team’s ambitions don’t stop there. Their plan is to develop another idea from the challenge and create an SMS health advice service.

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the collaborative effort of this OpenIDEO challenge, and especially to all the winning concept authors who helped to inform Bive’s social business that is having a vital impact on the underserved population of Caldas and nearby communities.

How might you create positive impact today?

(Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In design thinking, designing for impact, health innovation
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A Lesson in Empathy

March 13, 2013 — 6 Comments

My friend Delos “Toby” Cosgrove is a fellow blogger for LinkedIn. He and his wonderful organization, the Cleveland Clinic, deserve a massive shout-out for their recent video entitled “Empathy.” I challenge you to watch it without a few tears forming.

Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task. When communicated as it is in this video, empathy can be truly inspirational. What the Cleveland Clinic movie reveals is the true scale and complexity of the challenge of understanding a complex social situation in order to design a system that supports many and various needs.

Think of this movie as a design brief. How would you design a hospital or health care system that helps and supports each of the people and their circumstances that you see here? How would you change the space, the roles that staff play, the type and manner in which patients receive information, the support systems around patients and staff?

How do you go about being inspired by empathy?

(Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In design thinking, designing for impact, health innovation
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5 Inspiring Social Design Pioneers

November 19, 2012 — Leave a comment

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Recently I spent an evening at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design attending the awards ceremony for the Curry Stone Design Prize. Founded in 2008 by Clifford Curry and Delight Stone and curated by Chee Pearlman with Emiliano Gandolfi, the  prize is awarded to designers who are developing and implementing groundbreaking and visionary design innovation in the social sector.

The 2012 awards saw a remarkable range of work described by well-crafted movies that reveal the approaches and motivations of the designers, as well as the cleverness of the ideas themselves. I strongly encourage you to follow the links to each of the videos below. You will be rewarded with inspirational examples of what can be achieved when talented individuals and teams apply design thinking to important problems. Continue Reading…

In design thinking, designing for impact, health innovation, social impact , , , ,
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Jamie Oliver’s TED wish

February 16, 2010 — 9 Comments

Jamie

For avid followers of the TED conference it will not be new news that British chef Jamie Oliver won the TED Prize this year. The result is that he gets $100,000 plus the chance to make his wish in front of the TED audience. These days that audience consists of millions (so far there have been over 200 million talks viewed on the website). You can already check out the video of his passionate plea for a healthier America. Here is his wish:

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

Tackling obesity and encouraging healthier eating is something that I believe design and design thinking can make a significant contribution to. Whether it be through innovations in new technologies and applications that allow us to track our food intake better, ( I am a big fan of the i-Phone app Lose It) or through the design of behavioral change programs that consist of new incentives, new tools and communication of new social norms.
There have already been hundreds of folks volunteering to help but I hope that as designers we get behind this wish. The chronic diseases that result from obesity are a major cause of our out of control health costs.

In design thinking, health innovation , , ,
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Re-designing healthcare

September 23, 2009 — 4 Comments

I spent last week at the Mayo Clinic symposium on health care innovation called Transform. It was excellent. A great group of speakers and an audience populated by some of the most important players in health care innovation.

You can check out the videos from many of the speakers at the Mayo Transform site. Unfortunately I can’t link you to the individual talks but I would recommend the following in particular:

Clayton Christensen on the Innovators Prescription. For those that have not read the book this talk makes a rigorous argument for how the business model of healthcare needs to be restated.

Amy Tenderich talks about the Diabetes Challenge. An attempt to get design thinkers engaged in improving the lives of diabetes sufferers.

Victor Montori, a Mayo physician, does a great job of showing how doctors get it wrong when they don’t consider the whole lifestyle of the patient when they prescribe remedies.

Denis Cortese, the current head of the Mayo, describes where the health care system is dysfunctional today and what Mayo plans to focus on to help resolve that.

Elizabeth Teisberg talks about health care policy and in particular the importance of focusing on value not cost reduction.

Frank Moss from the MIT Media Lab gives a great talk and demonstration (with one of his graduate students) on empowering each of us to be responsible for more of our own health care.

Patrick Garaghty, CEO of Minnesota Blue Cross Blue Shield, makes an impressive argument for how it is in the interests of payers to focus on wellness programs. Given the bad press that insurance companies have been getting in the recent debates it was good to see some real leadership coming from them.

As always, Larry Keeley makes an eloquent and urgent case for innovation based on showing how Leonardo got things wrong.

The three ‘i-spotter’ award speakers all gave great short talks on their projects – Jaspal Sandhu, Jeff Belkora and Alexandra Carmichael.

I headed up the last session which was specifically on design thinking. I was followed by three wonderful talks by Karl Ronn of P&G, Christi Dining Zuber from the Kaiser Innovation team and Maggie Breslin from SPARC, the Mayo design and innovation group.

Overall I was very impressed by the level of the dialog about innovation and design thinking, particularly amongst the physicians. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a profession that is focused on making people’s lives better is so enthusiastic about a human centered innovation process.

The image is courtesy of Marc Koska at Safepoint. I included the story of Marc’s innovation, the auto-disable syringe, in my talk.

In health innovation , , , , ,
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