Empathy: a superpower our virtual health care providers must aspire to
Earlier this week, I was invited to give a speech here in São Paulo at an event titled Digital Darwinism about the power of empathy. Quite by coincidence (or not), I woke up early that same day to the news on the radio of the death of Dr. Kate Granger. I had no idea of Dr Granger or her campaign in the UK, despite having worked last year in South America on an idea very similar to her movement #hellomynameis. I was shocked by the similarities between her work in the British healthcare system and a similar situation in Brazil’s SUS — social health care system.
Having been diagnosed with cancer a year previously in 2011, Granger explained that during hospital stays staff routinely referred to her as “bed #7” and “the girl with cancer.” “I just couldn’t believe the impersonal nature of care, and how people seemed to be hiding behind their anonymity,” she recalled.But, one day, when she was to be transported from the emergency room to the urology department, something changed and an orderly spoke to her with the opening phrase of “Hello, my name is Brian,”. Dr. Granger noted that, when people introduced themselves, it was comforting and made her feel safer and more like a person than an illness. Dr. Granger sent out a tweet noting this with the now famous hashtag #hellomynameis. In the five years between being diagnosed with cancer and her death on 23 July, Dr Kate Granger helped change the face of doctor-patient relations and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity.
Last year I spent a number of weeks listening to patients in the Brazilian healthcare system describing to me their shock at encountering a private healthcare smart-choice provider where medics actually looked them in the eye. For most of the nation’s poorest citizens the luxury of a human connection in the healthcare system is something they had never witnessed. The sheer power of the this deeper connection in creating relationships between medic and (im)patient was one of those simple insights that say so much. It also spoke volumes to the provider dr.consulta and their executives realised that such practices could form part of their internal guidelines for how doctors should always behave. Given the proven importance of the Sentinel effect in medicine — the tendency for human performance to improve when participants are aware that their behavior is being evaluated. It would indicate that empathy in the healthcare sector is not only the starting point for good healthcare but fundamental in all human interactions.
However, it is perhaps understandable that the potential for the health sector to create deeper experiences through empathy is coming to the fore at exactly the same time as the industry and the professionals that form that industry are being threatened by the disruptive forces of technology. As the New York Times recently reported, as “Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides”. Elsewhere coverage of Wired Magazine’s 2016 Health Event offered an overview of larger trends in healthcare innovation. Notable among them, according to the magazine “the attempt to automate the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals”. As we are witnessing in so many other areas of society at this moment in time, lip service to empathy is on the rise whilst the reality is that we are are witnessing many trends which go against our current interpretation of empathy and to a certain extent reinforcing what MIT’s Sherry Turkle calls an assault on empathy.
The success of Granger’s campaign in the UK and of dr.consulta here in Brazil emphasize may perhaps serve as models for what we must aspire to create in the virtual health care professionals of the future.
Article by Tim Lucas (Chief Listening Officer). For more content about Human Centric Design check out our #designingdeeper blog
