Taking Insight from 30,000ft to the
Surgical Suite
— and Beyond
From Air to Care: Edition 2
How might aviation innovation disrupt health Care?
The titanic volume and complexity of health care’s data has exceeded our system’s ability to actualize its information’s promising power correctly, reliably and safely: the number of patients killed by preventable medical errors yearly is equivalent to four jumbo jets crashing weekly. Troves of data, thought to be our saving grace and North Star, have become our own Atlas’ burden.
The number of patients killed by preventable medical errors yearly is equivalent to four jumbo jets crashing weekly.
The World Health Organization’s list of diseases has inflated to distinguish over 13,000 different types of acute and chronic ailments — more than 13,000 ways the human body can fail. Each requires precise actions for course correction. The necessary information captured to keep a well world in balance is accelerating America’s failing health care system’s imminent collapse. How might designers and care teams adapt insight from comparable aviation and its 30 year model cultural transformation — making plane travel safer than riding an escalator — to tame its own complexity and manage information overload?
- The landmark rollout of a deceptively simple and sustainable aviation-inspired safety checklist protocol virtually eliminated central line infections across the state of Michigan in 2001, saving 1,500 lives and $100 million annually. How might insight from 30,000 feet inspire innovation in the surgical suite — and beyond? What are health care’s most pressing but most promising areas for transformation in taming complexity and managing information overload?
- Tech tonics have spurred the proliferation of patient and clinician-collected biometrics, compounding health care organizations’ already bloated data streams. Care teams grapple with a multiplicity of shallow data points when they need a singularity of meaningful knowledge constellations. How might designers follow aviation’s lead in designing smart technologies and integrated ecosystems to enable greater access to actionable information at the time it matters most across the care continuum?
- Co-evolving exploration of precision care and population wellness promises predictive and preventative care that is patterned and precise. Such an ascending scale from person to planet requires exacting and robust analysis and interpretation. How might avionic systems alleviate pressure and inspire breakthroughs in the way care teams and empowered patients interact with each other, their technologies and information, transforming hopeful evidence-based care into a co-participatory reality?
- No longer is change constant. The alter rate at which variables impact complex systems and information generation fluctuates between subtle lag and abrupt, breakneck speeds. Such infrequency in pace makes planning for the irregular difficult and dangerous. How might aviation’s engineered processes influence the design of a new health care system that maintains its integrity under pressure and better manages the unanticipated and unknown across the care continuum?
- Conventional efforts to simplify the complex default to optimizing instrumentation, which is neither efficient nor effective. Systematic orchestration, the coordination of care’s interconnected parts, is the most promising solution to taming complexity. How might health care follow aviation’s lead in enacting an industry-wide cultural shift where the systematic taming of complexity and conscientious, timely and explicit use of information help patients achieve the best possible outcomes?
Thought leaders from Johns Hopkins, United Airlines and Firebone will converge at SXSW 2015 to discuss how aviation innovation can disrupt health care, but we need your vote to help get us there! To vote for our panel presentation and learn more, please visit:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/38218