Citizen-centered apps

The wave of making public data available continues as more countries adopt the model set by data.gov - latest is the UK's data.gov.uk. Expectedly, it did not take long before sectors like transportation and law identified areas to apply the data sources and build apps.

And now "data openness" has hit health care - see and here come the healthcare apps. With infrastructures like Healthvault and Google Health in place like the uptake should be faster and deeper. The question of privacy still remains, but I think once utility increases, so will security and privacy. This is the ultimate bottom-up consumer-centric apps design I had hoped for.

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Social media and healthcare

This weekend Aftenposten carried different stories around the cost of healthcare (for eg here and here - Norwegian texts). The technocrats and the bureaucrats will haggle about numbers and details while politicians extol the virtues of their party programs -- or more likely downplay the programs of rivals.

This dance is pretty obvious for most citizens, however, the voice of the citizen is absent in this discussion on the cost of healthcare and what we should be doing about it. I hope this is not for long and that the debate on cost of healthcare can be channelled inclusively and constructively to produce some creative solutions.

Last autumn in an article in a Norwegian trade journal, I talked about patient-driven self-service site Patientslikeme.com. Yesterday, the Aftenposten carried an article on a patient with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) around the rising cost of healthcare. The individual interviewed described how ALS had almost destroyed his life but that state-financed healthcare made it possible for him to lead a meaningful life. The story behind Patientslikeme.com also has a link to ALS. Same conditions but different solutions.

I was struck by how in Norway, the state takes care of ALS-patients -- at a pretty high cost. In the US, beyond health insurance, there are mechanisms that catalyze innovation. It is useless pitching one system against the other since I'm concerned about finding how state-financed healthcare (in Norway) can drive innovation. I think a first step is in sensitizing people to the notion that resources (healthcare included) are limited and we all need to be active in finding solutions. Something like where the state can serve as a platform and that cultivates creative services.

I believe social media solutions have an important role to play - not as a technology in itself, but as a catalyst to socialize the ideas and complexities of healthcare for ordinary citizens. To raise awareness and then to get them to take a more participative, co-production role in health care services and to be part of the solutions. Utlimately helping drive inefficiencies out of the system and lowering the cost of healthcare.

In that respect it is good to see that the magazine of the Norwegian Medical Association carried an article on the role of social media in healthcare Tidskrift. I consider it a simple but significant start.

Innovations in service delivery

I have been spending a lot of time looking for innovations in service creation and come up with some very interesting cases. But none so impressive that could actually get me back to health care blogging.

Listening to the Aravind talk at TED India I was left speechless. Just earlier in the day I had attended a working meeting to structure a research project around service innovation. Earlier in the week, I had attended a similar meeting around service innovation in health care. Watching the video, I was struck by how innovation was happening in practice.

What was more startling was that they were addressing the same problem - just applying the similar technologies with a different mind set (and may be a different value system). Our health care, in the western world, need not be so expensive and so unreachable. Admittedly, we do not have large volumes, but we have the technologies like telemedicine but have not deployed them correctly. The real shocker was taking the McDonald-model to health care. More so, my own realization that there is a sense of job-protection at play when we restrain ourselves in thinking of doctors "flipping burgers" (or consultants for that matter).

The move by Aravind Eye care give themselves competition, by sharing knowledge to competitors and thereby raising the bar, is truly inspiring. And at the same time, daunting for many. Have we created a society where we must hang on to job-status at any cost? Not deliberatly at any rate. Service innovation can come from beyond intelligence and capability.

Or to quote Dr. G. Venkataswamy, the founder of Aravind "Intelligence and capability are not enough. There must be the joy of doing something beautiful".