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".

Visiting your doctor digitally

At the Telemedicine conference in Tromsø this year, an interesting paper was presented. Meeting your doctor using a webcam and an LCD screen is no rocket science however, the requirements of privacy and integration are critical.

Being able to meet my doctor this way would save me a lot of time -- 45 mins to be exact; which is the time I have to spend to make the detour to visit him. If I could upload my bloodtest results before I met him, it would have saved me even more time. But then again, updating my Electronic Medical Record (EPJ in Norwegian) calls for robust and flexible privacy and integration solutions. I think this is a solution that should be made available to the public. The challenge is getting my local politician to push the case and getting others to push him too.

Microsoft's Global Healthcare director Bill Crounse visited the telemedicine conference and posted this article that echoes my sentiments -- Norway can be a test bed for digital health and well-being.

While writing this post, I recalled my earlier post on using videoconferencing to improve the quality of life for digital nomads (like me). In such a scenario, I would like to be able to choose a channel on the remote and automatically be connected to my parents' TV and be able to see them and talk to them. This is the videophone we have been talking about for decades. Only thing is it is not one device, rather it is a collection of independent devices brought together by a service -- a service that a well-being service provider will offer. I hope fellow baby-boomers will be just as impatient for such solutions. After all, I would like to digitally meet my children whereever we are.

The death of distance as Frances Cairncross put it is going to be very real.

And today, for us in the northern hemisphere, the days start getting shorter. Have a great summer!!

Accelerating health care services

As I write this, it appears that Barack Obama has won the nomination as the Democrat's presidential candidate. Whether he does what he says in his health care program is left to be seen (see my previous post).

However, the health care industry seems to be coming together in a strong way. Both the combination of health care providers and telecom providers teaming up to create use cases that set the context for solutions. Continua Health Alliance is such a forum.

Creating such use cases with consumer-citizens at the center -- or consumer-citizen centered design -- can significantly help accelerate the process of creating solutions where software and services meet. See also this post on my other blog

Microsoft is agressively building the Amalga brand. This is definitely a space to watch as they attempt to link the enterprise and online worlds (hospitals and consumer). Expect more acquisitions in the health care sector.

Can the Nordic model for health care scale up?

As Google Health and Microsoft's Healthvault solutions get out there and as health care devices hit the market I see the Nordic model being challenged to meet newer forms of interaction between medical professionals and consumers. Can the model scale?

"Scaling up" and "scaling out" are terms with origins from the IT world (see scalability). However, in a non-IT context like health care, these terms have the same meaning and implications. What Obama plans to do with his health care plan appears to be taking the Nordic model (20 million people in 4 countries) and scaling it up to meet the needs of the US (approx. 300 million people).

Can the Obama health care plan deliver? on what timeline? I am not a political pundit but I am more interested in the implementation challenges in making such a thing happen. Therefore I think it would be mutually innovative for an Obama (or Clinton) administration to collaborate with the Nordic countries - to swap practices and develop new concepts for health care and insurance.

The Nordic model could do with an overhaul with input from a commercial, privatised perspective and the Democrats model can learn from a time-tested governmental welfare model. The welfare model as practiced in the Nordic countries, gives its residents a legal right to healthcare (in Norway this is legislated through Chapter 5 of the Folketrygdeloven - social insurance law, in Sweden there are similar laws.)