Finding Duende in Healthcare
“We’ve got the science of life down pretty well, it’s the art of living that remains a challenge.” — BIF2015 storyteller Michael Samuelson
Healthcare reform dialogue does a great job diagnosing the challenges facing our system: patients are frustrated by truncated, impersonal care experiences. We spend a lot to get comparatively mediocre outcomes. Providers feel a lack of connection to their patients, compounded by the pressure to treat more patients, faster, for less money.
And solutions are often focused on treating these problems. We integrate patient feedback loops into the current operating model. We cut costs. We develop and teach methods that help providers connect with patients within the current system’s constraints.
To be clear, designing solutions to challenges presented by the current system ensures that patients (read: we) continue to receive what is often palliative and sometimes life-saving care. But in the same way that getting too close to a photograph blurs our vision of the whole picture, it’s hard to re-imagine the way we think and talk about healthcare when we’re examining the current system at such stubbornly close range.
To change the way we think about healthcare, we have to borrow a new lens through which to see it.
This year’s BIF Summit lent exactly this kind of lens to a group of passionate healthcare innovators and leaders. In a post-Summit conversation centered around change in our healthcare system — with inspiration drawn from the stories of this year’s Summit storytellers —participants sourced and applied new visions for healthcare from a seemingly unlikely but actually very fitting source:
Artists.
The Summit storyteller line-up included an M.D., a grand-piano-playing cancer survivor, an open source patient data advocate who videotaped his own brain surgery, and a wellness expert. But when asked to reflect on the insights that had sparked new visions for transforming healthcare, the participants were more frequently citing the stories of an artistic director, an opera singer, and a painter.
“If we’re in a transactional relationship with our audience, then we’re in the wrong relationship.” — Curt Columbus, Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company
I f anyone knows that relationships are a competitive advantage in the current economy, it’s Curt Columbus. Speaking to the dwindling budgets in the U.S. for the arts, the Artistic Director highlighted the importance of building co-creative relationships with the theater’s artists and audience to invite their trust and investment over time. If artists have a say in the material they bring to life and audiences are involved in the process of curating, a play becomes a co-created experience instead of a product to be delivered.
In our Friday conversation, participants applied Columbus’ vision to the interactions that define healthcare.
Could relationship building be a competitive advantage in healthcare?
(Group consensus: Yes.)
What if providers, patients, and caregivers understood their interactions as opportunities to co-create visions for healthy, well lives — and the system incentivized that approach? What if the healthcare system utilized the capacities of communities to support those co-created visions outside the hospital walls? Columbus infused our conversation with the possibility of a system that cultivates a mutual sense of trust and agency.
Duende: loosely translated as having soul. A heightened state of emotion, expression, and authenticity.
Weaving opera and commentary into a 15-minute narrative (no small feat), Carla Dirikov invited the audience to acknowledge both the power and limits of human intellect as a tool for knowing. Referencing Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca and the concept of duende, Dirikov reminded us of the elements of human experience that transcend verbal communication or quantifiable measures of progress. “Words,” she remarked, “are just words. Intentions are hard to translate.”
One of the visions that aroused the most enthusiasm in our Friday session was sourced directly from this narrative. BIF Experience Designer Karen Jorge urged the group to consider how healthcare might recapture its own sense of duende — evoking, in the context of Dirikov’s story, a vision of a healthcare system that provides holistic care by acknowledging emotion and wisdom as knowledge resources. Healthcare data provides a quantitative portrait of health. How could healthcare account for the emotional, social, and spiritual realities that the data can’t always capture?
“I painted. It made me feel better. I thought it would help others.” — Jeff Sparr, Co-Founder of PeaceLove Studios
Admittedly, to call Jeff Sparr a painter is to oversimplify his story. His foray into painting — born of a quest for respite from the realities of living with OCD — eventually sparked the birth of PeaceLove Studios. Not only does Sparr’s story speak to the therapeutic power of artistic practices, but also to the ability we as humans have to help one another heal.
How can our healthcare system more purposefully integrate mental and physical health treatment? What if the system crowdsourced patient-vetted therapies for coping with mental illness, in addition to traditional treatment? And, in a broader sense, could a vision for humanized care include prescribing art, social interaction, and other human activities that add value to survival?
Works of art, said John Dewey, “are the most intimate and energetic means of aiding individuals to share in the arts of living.” Art allows us to make meaning — to explore, communicate, and even define the purposes of our lives.
Maybe it’s no fortunate accident that the most resonant insights for a group of passionate healthcare innovators and leaders came from the wisdom of artists.
Healthcare, at it’s best, should enable us to engage in the art of living.
While the visions above aren’t fleshed out or perfect, they do reveal that our healthcare dialogue implicitly cries for a specific need: in a system that is highly specialized and siloed, what we crave is a sense of connection in our care. Borrowing an artist’s lens, we’re able to imagine healthcare that is co-created, holistic, and that adds value both to our experience in the system and to the lives we live beyond it.
