Logic and Compassion, Facts and Nurturing, Fun and Exploring - check here

We continue the sometimes joyful and sometimes painful path to try to be better human beings - this is only possible because we can rise above logic, that we find the wonder and hope, the language and words to inspire us and keep us going. Thanks for visiting.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Jawdroppingly fun way to generate Customer Exprience! Gamestorming - How an idea ignited Starbucks

How cool is this? Just after writing about Health spaces, I find this great social network story about playing games to design new experiences that engage customers -

Watch this video - and bring innovation and fun into your workplace - AND improve your customer relationships with new ideas from the people who care - employees in your business !

MIT OpenCourseWare: I'm invested

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Health Spaces Part 2

Another in the series of posts about Health spaces - how do we manage our time and space when it comes to health and healing.

Take a look at this article about doctors who accept walk in patients as a matter of course

A shift to Just in Time Care - it takes thinking to make it work, but what benefits flow.






MIT OpenCourseWare: I'm invested

Design for Experience: Spaces for Health and Healing - Part 1

Last month I participated in the Institute for the Future's Health Horizon's conference at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Now you're talking about an amazing space to talk about health and healing.

While there, I had the pleasure of finding out about Quarantine Landscapes.

There is a lot we can learn about in designing Customer Experience from the approach being pioneered by Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG

They brought together an eclectic group of 18 architects, designers, artists and more...showing how you can set up a

"design studio without any official institutional affiliation can manage to set itself up, using equipment as simple as cheap wine, PDFs, and Post-It notes, inside already existing spaces around the city"

Of course the city is NYC, but, for those of us who do not have the privilege of living there, we know that good things can happen outside Manhattan.

We have seen the detailed, more mechanistic approach to Customer Experience Management - mapping the moment by moment events, activities that constitute customer touchpoints - These can bring to our attention critical interactions that matter to the customer but may not be paid adequate attention by the business which the customer is patronizing.

Space design offers another approach, whose value has been shown by Apple, in the design of the successful Apple retail stores - now being copied by others. Click on the link to see the Luxotica Eyewear store - described by the NY Times as "a touch of Disney a touch of Apple"

Nicola and Greg point the way to new approaches for involving customers in designing their experience in ways that pay attention to what matters most, not to the business, but to the customer.








MIT OpenCourseWare: I'm invested

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Managing Healthcare Through Social Networks

"In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men." Cicero

Mari Carmen Domingo of the Barcelona Tech University in Spain, helps us all with a great overview of the actual practice of physician and patient social networks in the e-Health, July 2010issue of www.computer.org the magazine of the the computer society of the IEEE. Bravo to Mari Carmen. The link above gets you to the abstract and references only, so I'm distributing Domingo's contribution to the wider audience it deserves in the CRM and Health 2.0 world.

That's such a great closing quote that Domingo chose.... health is one of those things that is not just desirable, it is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves or others.

"Healthcare social networks provide an active platform for sharing ideas, discussing symptoms and debating treatment options - tasks that together promise to improve patient care." Health 2.0 is a "movement" which harnesses the Internet to improve health through networks of (ideally collaborating) patients, healthcare givers, healthcare providers - professional or certified, and other stakeholders.

WHY do folks join the movement?
4 levels of engagement by US citizens were identified by the Health Engagement Barometer January 2009
1. 80% are INVOLVED in health, but don't necessarily gather or share info
2. 33% are INFORMED, gathering and sharing information more than once a week
3. 39% are ENGAGED, identifying health condition/treatment by actively gathering and sharing and advocating a point of view
4. 22% are INFO-ENTIAL - influential through information - are INVOLVED INFORMED AND ENGAGED

I remember (video link - Engelbart @ Google) learning in August 2007 that the largest category of searches at that time were related to Health. Domingo list later surveys confirming this trend of using the Internet for health

- 61% of US citizens look online for health information - Pew Internet Project Dec 2009
- 63% perform searches at least once a month - iCrossing survey Elkin 2008

Physician social networks allow doctors to "share clinical cases, images, videos and medical knowledge". 60% of US Physicians use or plan to use a Physician Social Network with 86% depend on the Internet more than any other resource to search for health, medical or prescription drug information.
Examples of physician-only communities:
Sermo - 112,000 members in 68 specialties
Ozmosis
DoctorNetworking

In the exchange by physicians on drugs, devices and treatments, they share direct experience helping each other navigate the growing oceans of medical knowledge and practice. And they can do it real time from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, and they can do it immediately, sifting through the options with a patient, side by side.

TRUST is the major issue - are participants credentialed and how throughly is that checked? Is information reliable and can it be checked? Peer to peer ranking of the usefulness and relevance of comments has emerged as a crowd-sourcing tool to build reliability and trust, together with the building of online reputations by individual physicians as they comment and evaluate each other's comments.

Patient social networks enable direct patient support by other patients or their caregvers, sharing relevant or related knowledge about illness, healing, recovery and well-being. PatientsLikeMe has 58,000 registered participants who share how an illness affects their everyday lives, an area not often addressed by doctors. Tools for tracking medications, symptoms and health outcomes allow date to be tracked and viewed in easy to understand charts, giving patients the ability to look for others who have similar medical profiles.

Patient networks are a response to highly medicalized formal interactions about the very human essential characteristic: health. Patients are banding together to help each other out in the tough environment of today's health landscape that is impersonal, cost-bound, raining down hard- to-understand generalized abstract information, populated by severely time constrained healthcare providers.

Disaboom is a social network for people with disabilities with 100,000 members who help each other reduce their sense of isolation from general society.

CureTogether has over 7200 patients who track and compare health data, helping scientists to accelerate research into cures.

Reducing anxiety through real time interaction with people who care is a huge benefit of patient networks. The annual Health 2.0 conference held in San Francisco in 2010 is the epicenter for patient networks.

TRUST is the biggest concern in patient social networks - how much can the information there be trusted.

PRIVACY is another issue - in the US with HIPAA the law of the land, the interaction between social networks of patients and social networks of physicians is constrained due to the limits on information sharing. Some approaches www.heartpatients.com let patients control the information shared.

The challenges are formidable - four very different worlds are interacting: (leaving off the drug and medical device industries for now, but they are essential parts of the picture too)

Information Technology
Patient communities
Health Provider communities
Health research scientific communities

As Herophiles said in 300 BC (tip of the hat to Ying Mitchell of www.fitfromthecore.com)

When Health is absent
Wisdom cannot reveal itself
Art cannot become manifest
Strength cannot be exerted
Wealth is useless and Reason is powerless


We have no choice but to move forward, three steps and anticipate and prepare for the real possibility of having to fail, err and take one or two steps back.

System Design and Community Design must co-evolve.

Nothing else than our Health depends on it.


MIT OpenCourseWare: I'm invested