A Call to Action Regarding the Patient Experience
Richard I Anderson
October 16, 2012
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"Of all the industries we interact with regularly as consumers,
the medical industry definitely defines the low point in quality
and consistency of customer experience. Most of us emerge
from interactions with the medical establishment feeling more
like victims than paying customers."
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"Health care is broken. ... We have set up a delivery
system that is fragmented, unsafe, not patient-
centered, full of waste, and unreliable. Despite the
best efforts of the workforce, we built it wrong. It
isn't built for modern times."
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“Combining the principles of disruptive innovation
with design thinking is exactly what health care in
America needs. We need to disrupt the current
business model of health-care delivery. And we
need these disruptions to be designed experiences
that are consumer-focused."
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“UX design has done a great job in the last decade
of redefining … how we define requirements for
products with digital UIs. But this has come at a cost
of upward mobility in our organizations. We’re
functional players that make tactical work more
efficient. We’re not strategic players that help our
organizations transform themselves."
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HCD = Human-Centered Design
from Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus
Technology and Meaning Change, Norman & Verganti, 2012
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“The average American physician
interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.”
A Doctor’s Touch, Abraham Verghese M.D., July 2011
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“The problem with healthcare is that
doctors are a stage 3 (of 5) tribe, a
group of people who think ‘I am great,
and you are not.’”
TEDxSinCity, Dave Logan., May 2011
“We let our arrogance reinvent
us… we thought we were
gods again.”
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“If I were to walk into a room filled with my
colleagues and ask for their support right now
and start to tell [stories of all the mistakes I've
made], I probably wouldn't get through two of
those stories before they would start to get
really uncomfortable, somebody would crack a
joke, they'd change the subject, and we would
move on. ... That is the system that we have -- it
is a complete denial of mistakes. ... [However,]
errors [in medicine] are absolutely ubiquitous.”
Doctors Make Mistakes; Can We Talk About That?,
iander Brian Goldman M.D., September 2011

“Medical education and residency is pretty
militaristic. You fall in line or you're out. Trust
me, I've been there. If you are an 'outside the
box' thinker, this doesn't last long in medical
school or residency. The egos of your
superiors are too threatened. This is an
important fact. Doctors have such a
preoccupation with being right, they can't
tolerate being wrong.”
Rethinking Healthcare, Jay Parkinson M.D.,
TEDxMidAtlantic, November 2011
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“The medical culture is not only uncreative, it
is anti-creative. ... Why should doctors be
creative? ... Doctors only have pills and
scalpels. ... Our reality is very different from
an innovative, creative culture. ... We fall into
line. ... Whenever we treat patients we treat
them with algorithms. We regurgitate; we
don't think creatively. We also have this thing
called a god-complex... And we're just so
frickin tired... And we're terrified of the law.”
Rethinking Healthcare, Jay Parkinson M.D.,
iander TEDxMidAtlantic, November 2011

e-Patient Dave
Regina Holliday
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“empathy can’t be achieved with a one-time,
remedial skills development course. It’s a shift
in philosophy and behavior that requires daily
reinforcement to make a difference. Trying to
provide an empathy boost with a one-time
investment without follow-through is a waste
of money and can become a source of
resentment from a staff.”
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“We call individuals ‘patients.’ We
call physicians healthcare
‘professionals.’ Professionals ‘care
for’ patients… Their proposals are
not just suggestions; they are
prescriptions or literally ‘physician
orders.’ Patients who don’t take their
medicine are not ‘in compliance.’”
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“Learn about the problematic cultural
characteristics that dominate healthcare and
that need to change. Alter how you do design
research. Don’t limit yourself to incremental
innovation or work that’s narrowly focused on
UIs. Question the advisability of doing projects
that, in essence, only amount to putting lipstick
on the very large healthcare pig. Escape your
comfort zone in order to have the kind of
impact on the world that you desire.”
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Medicine 2.0’11, Medicine X, &
Partnership with Patients Summit
E-Patient Scholar
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