Mayo Clinic, Global Health and Design Thinking. You might be wondering what those three terms have to do with each together. This is my partial recap on time spent at the Mayo Clinic this past week where I saw one potential vision of what the future of healthcare might look like. It was a great privellege to hang out at the Mayo Clinic for what was the best conference I have attended in a long long time or maybe ever (Amy Tenderich at Diabetes Mine also has a recap that I encourage you to read). The Mayo Center for Innovation hosted a TED style event – Transform, a collaborative symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery, all the videos are online (highly recommended viewing). It is going to take me a few months to digest what happened there and wrap my mind around everything I heard. There were over 430 people from 23 states, 7 countries and over 1,350 tweets. The caliber and just genuine niceness of every person I interacted with was on some other level, the conversations were rich, deep and thoughtful. The conference organizers *created an open purposeful environment* that led to an incredible experience. The folks at Mayo certainly shaped and designed a great space to achieve the symposium goals (this all reminded me of the Winston Churchill quote – “We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us”).  Let me stop before you think I have joined a cult. The direct connection to global health here – it was discussed by keynote speakers and my first tweet from Mayo was “this place reminds me of Aravind (Aravind Eye Care System). Jaspal, Mahad and I have written several articles and cases studies on Aravind and I continue to believe it is a premiere model for innovation and care delivery. More on this in a bit.

The Global Health Convergence: “Design Thinking” and Innovation
There were many things that made this event great, however, in terms of extending your horizons and making you think, one of the most refreshing things was to see some convergence of disciplines and people from a variety of backgrounds. This is very hard to do and cannot be underrated. We all live in a sea of fragmentation,  in systems, in professions and fragmentation in how we solve problems. This is even reflected on a micro level – look at the mainstream peer reviewed journals in healthcare where you see severe fragmentation amongst the physician, nursing and pharmacy focused journals (some of this is for good reasons and some of it’s not). This conference was in part about ditching that fragmentation and about a convergence of ideas, people and relationships working collaboratively. In addition to innovative projects, new models of delivering care and how the process of innovation can be conceptualized, managed, and enabled was discussed. Much of this was encompassed under the umbrella of Design Thinking (innovating and problem solving using various methods). Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, was a headliner on this front and re-emphasized a call for design to big, an ethic of design for social impact/change, which Jaspal and I have covered on this blog before (see our previous post – 8 Links for Design and Global Health).

If you were too look at the methods of design thinking you would see an amalgamation and convergence of mostly existing methods from a variety of disciplines (from engineering to ethnography to epidemiology to psychology to health services research to name a few examples). As Tim Brown said in his talk: “Design thinking begins with integrative thinking which is the ability to hold opposing constraints and opposing ideas and from those create  new solutions…this means balancing societal needs (desirability) with what’s possible (feasibility) and what’s sustainable (viability)“. When Tim Brown said “Design should not be left in the hand of designers” he hit the nail on the head – design thinking can be incorporated by non-”designers” to help innovate and solve problems. What we do has to be a participatory, collaborative effort. Tim Brown wrote more about this participatory perspective (How to Design a Participatory System in a post crisis economy world). There are many critically important reasons why this is a key factor, one of which goes back to Paulo Freirean educational tenets – people who participate in their own education, become engaged in the transformation of their own world. The other reason is because even though as brilliant as Tim Brown is, (and all the people working at organizations like his) he doesn’t have all the answers, or even the correct ones (read his other piece at FastCompany on HSAs where his point is highly debatable about the solution and at best has over simplified the problem).

The bottom line that I took away is that we need more of a participatory system, we should be open to new ways of approaching problems (“design thinking”) and we can provide some structure to the process of innovation. Besides design thinking the other major theme I want to point to is global health – as I said above in the keynote presentations global health made an apperance. Both Clay Christensen and Tim Brown mentioned the Aravind Eye Care System and Jaspal spoke entirely about global health. We have said on this blog before that there are many lessons that can be learned from outside our system where innovation is taking place due to extreme necessity, it’s not a choice (a lot of this is taking place over the web and with mHealth – mobile phones for health). In Global Health, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of innovative experiments going on using a wide area of technology (devices, drugs, the web, mobile phones, etc.), however, how we track these experiments, talk about failure, and share what has been learned seems to be highly inefficient and lacking.  We have covered a lot of this ground over the past three years, the easiest summary of examples can be found in this post:

42 “Extremely affordable” Innovations in Global Health

Clay C, Tim B, and Jaspal all pointed to global health as a place we can learn from. While there are some serious limitations, there is a ton to learn from the use of mobile phones in developing countries and how that might apply here – because overseas usage of phones is far beyond what is being done in the US. The other area to keep an eye on is chronic diseases. In some places, there is going to be an explosion of chronic conditions and new models will have to be devised to handle that tidal wave. I would love to see Amy Tenderich and her community do a brainstorming session on design for diabetes in developing countries. On this front see two previous posts:

1. Reverse South to North innovation – Borrowing innovation: health services, financial services, and clean tech
2. A massive wave of chronic disease in India and China

Let me leave you on a note of caution, a “design thinking” approach (remember using existing methods) can offer some powerful alternatives. However, there can also be something seductive about design thinking and a rapid approach (we’ve cautioned this on the graphics/visual side before). If you fall into that seduction, then this is just a fad for you, it’s on us to be rigorous, thoughtful and corrective when need be:

“The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.” IDEO website.

I have many more thoughts on this, if I get the time I’ll jot down a few more notes and quotes from the conference, in the meantime, it is well worth watching the videos from Transform.