Camila Batmanghelidjh at TED Salon London Nov 2010 | via
With a record number of early entries to the Making More Health competition, answering this question is going to be key for determining the winners. While new medical insights and technologies are being discovered and developed continuously, a truly innovative health project is one that uses new strategies beyond those used by traditional health systems.
Through sector research and conversations with experts from the field, the Changemakers Knowledge and Learning Team has uncovered some preliminary trends around innovation in health and well-being. Here’s a closer look with some real-life examples from the field:
- Intervention design: Successful innovators transform the way individuals engage in their health and well-being by designing simple and accessible interventions that can become part of an individual’s lifestyle – making the solution easy for both the health seeker and the provider of the intervention.
Example: Rebecca Onie founded Project HEALTH, which deploys over 600 student volunteers to staff Family Help Desks in clinics of urban medical centers. Recognizing the well-documented link between poverty and health, Project HEALTH understands that even the highest-quality traditional medical care is not enough to improve health outcomes for children and families in poverty — a prescription for antibiotics does little for a child who goes to bed hungry. Onie’s idea is to make health clinics the gateway to community resources that low-income families need to get healthy and stay healthy.
- Patient-centered care: More and more, innovators are recognizing that the patient voice is required in order to design effective and sustainable solutions for individuals, their families, and communities in which they live. By connecting channels of information to create highly-individualized information and opportunities that are applicable to large populations, many changemakers are creating interventions and models that are more tailored and appropriate for the patient than ever.
Example: Pedro Chaná, a trailblazing physician, is changing how patients and doctors work together to achieve more effective treatment for chronic illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonias. He created a health-care community in which all participants — physicians, patients, their families, and support groups — are partners in treatment.
- Financial transparency and cost reduction: So many barriers to health care are related to the accesibility of care itself. Many innovators are working to make the cost of care more transparent and are finding innovative ways to lower costs to the consumer or the marketplace. These innovations result in health products, services, and information being distributed to more and more people.
Example: David Green is enabling developing countries to produce, distribute, and service high-quality, affordable health-care products. Having already directed the successful production and distribution of two products (intraocular lenses and surgical sutures), Green is now launching an effort to manufacture and distribute top-of-the-line, cost effective, cosmetically acceptable, and locally maintainable hearing aids.
- Leveraging technology: Innovators are finding ways to create or leverage technologies to distribute care and information to more people than ever before. The innovative technologies aren’t likely to be found in hospitals: They’re more often found in people’s pockets, in their homes, or a combination on networked information platforms. Often, they’re not “health” technologies per se, but when applied in a health and well-being context, incorporate health solutions more holistically into an individual’s life.
Example: Kongkiat Kespechara has developed a management information system that is focused on the information needs of small hospitals in rural areas. His software, Hospital OS, is an open-source technology that enables hospitals to use their limited resources more effectively and to design new and improved services addressing the health needs of disadvantaged populations.
- Redefining the problem: Innovators are redefining what it means to be “sick,” “well,” “healthy,” “a patient,” “a consumer,” and more. By redefining the problems and challenges associated with health, new solutions are emerging that address age-old challenges in entirely new ways, often creating more holistic, sustainable, and accessible solutions.
Example: Camila Batmanghelidjh is creating a holistic model of care and support for children within schools and at the street level to substitute for the absent care and the ineffective formal system of social care. Her approach runs parallel to (and is the polar opposite of) the current care model in the United Kingdom.
Do you have a solution that responds to one or more of these areas of innovation? Changemakers invites you to enter the Making More Health competition until September 21, 2011.
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