Health 2.0 keynote recap – #health2con

I’m excited to be attending my first Health 2.0 conference today to learn more about the trends in healthcare innovation and meet the hackers, entrepreneurs, industry and government leaders who are driving disruptive change in the healthcare industry. As a User Experience designer, I’m pleased to see such a focus on patient-centered thinking. Here’s a quick recap and interpretation of the presentations I saw this morning.

The first session was a “dueling keynote,” two short presentations by two interesting speakers

• author, health futurist, and healthcare industry advisor, Jeff Goldsmith.
• publisher, Web 2.0 pundit, and “alpha geek” watcher, Tim O’Reilly

Goldsmith started off by talking about what he called the “Innovation Drop” across every sector of the healthcare industry, from medical devices and imaging technology to enterprise and clinical IT to healthcare delivery. In one example statistic, Pharma R&D spending has tripled while new drug introductions have dropped by 2/3 over the past few years.

After establishing his point about stagnation in the industry, he moved on to talk about the Boomer generation and the increased demand they will bring as they age and require more from the healthcare system. He illustrated he point by comparing the receding waters before a tsunami to the coming en masse retirement of Boomer healthcare practitioners. The tsunami’s wave, in his metaphor, will hit when that same population places unprecedented demand on a diminished healthcare system.

Goldsmith ended by stating that the industry needs to rethink its approach to innovation to increase the productivity of the healthcare system. He offered five calls to action.

• Tame the documentation problem in healthcare delivery
• Help both HCPs and patients find information effortlessly when and where they need it
• Accommodate the increasing diversity of HCP and patient needs and styles
• Equip patients and families with tools to better manage their own health
• Entertain and honor the patient

O’Reilly then launched into a talk on how disruptive innovation from outside the traditional healthcare industry is coming to change the way the healthcare system works. He characterized the trend of Web 2.0 companies as those who were able to weather the doc com bust by being the best in their industries at harvesting collective intelligence. To this he added the components that have come to characterize Web 2.0, a focus on cloud computing, data-driven applications, mobile interfaces, real-time information and pushing the Internet beyond the browser and into everyday objects and interactions.

He used the example of the media industry as a bellwether for what is coming in healthcare, adding the point that many currently successful companies will be usurped by new entrants and many will fail before reliable new business models are established. He offered a vision for the future in three specific technological trends: the introduction of tablet computing to the point of care, cloud-based services to unify and manage patient data, and the emergence of sensor platforms like smartphones and other connected devices to reduce the burden of patient-contributed information.

Finally, O’Reilly ended by telling the audience that to truly capitalize on the principles of Web 2.0 innovators should seek to harness the collective intelligence emerging from the introduction of new technologies and make smart use of the “information shadows” that result from our everyday actions.

In the Q&A that followed the keynotes, Goldsmith and O’Reilly outlined two fundamental challenges to idling the infrastructure on which a new healthcare system could be based:

• harnessing medical data and getting it to the HCPs and patients when and where they need it
• simplifying the transactional complexity of the existing payment system in healthcare and moving from a “pay for procedure” model to a “pay for outcomes” one.

Design is how it works

The title of the new book, Design is How it Works, on the power of “Big D” Design comes from a Steve Jobs quote: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” I haven’t read the book (yet), but something struck me as I was reading the Core77 review quoted below.

What Greene does differently than most other business book writers is dig deeper, not just repeating the story anecdotally but interviewing the key players to try to find what drives them. The OXO case study is supportive of one of his main theses, that the way to craft successful products that drive sales is to pay attention to users on the fringes of the customer base. Greene calls these users outliers, but REI, Clif Bar and Nike might call them extreme athletes, while Virgin Atlantic has its road warriors and Porsche has speed freaks. For OXO the elderly or the arthritic may be sensitive to form factors that healthy and youthful users might ignore. Correcting the product for the needs of that outlier population actually enhances the product for the rest of the user base.

Outliers… It’s a good idea, if not a new one. Designing for outliers equates to designing for people who are particularly sensitive to the performance of your product. The difficult thing about this particular design principle is that the maxim isn’t complete. At least as important as designing for the outlier, is selecting the right one. To which aspects of your product should your outliers be sensitive? Your outlier might be the extreme user who will push your product to its limits (REI), or the frequent user who spends the most time with your product (Virgin Atlantic), or the user who struggles the most using your product (OXO).

It’s a nuance, but it’s one that determines the difference between success and failure. Designing for the wrong outlier can be as catastrophic as designing a bad product. How do you understand which of your users are the right outliers? Well that’s where the research comes in.

Although almost all of the companies profiled by Greene eschew focus groups in favor of ethnography and a guiding corporate structure, each case demonstrates that when the customer is ignored or misevaluated, problems occur. The clearest lesson of Design is How it Works is that the end-user must be listened to, if not in focus groups, at least in spirit.

A good lesson. But which outliers should I “listen to.” I’m looking forward to reading the book to see if and how this question is addressed.

References

Book Review: Design is How it Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons, by Jay Greene – Core77.

Apple is the anti-Parc

For those who don’t know, Xerox Parc was Xerox’s formidible R&D center. Until 2002, when it was spun off, Parc did the basic research that created such ubiquitous technological innovations as bitmap graphics, GUI (featuring windows and icons), WYSIWYG editing, ethernet, InterPress (a pre PostScript resolution-independent graphical page-description language) and laser printing. The problem at Parc wasn’t developing viable technological innovations… it was monetizing them.

Apple, on the other hand, is all about monetizing technological innovations, just not their own… and they always have been. 25 years ago Apple released the first Macintosh, and became one of the firms to gain commercial success with a Xerox Parc innovation, the GUI interface. Apple still doesn’t have any significant muscle in basic R&D. What they do have is significant power in design, marketing, and business and the ability to make all the right connections to synthesize the right thing for the market at the right time.

Apple’s super power, I would argue, is introducing new technology to us in easily adoptable pieces–not first but best. Is this the ideal mix for a modern consumer electronics company? Seemingly, so.

5 years ago, who would have imagined that we would now make daily use of accelerometers and magnetometers, or orientation, light, and proximity sensors? It took years of many other companies trying and failing to get interaction with these technologies right, and although Apple continue to claim “no user research,” the world has been their testbed, and observations of how people have used (and not used) these technologies have clearly influenced their design.

Apple is adept at packaging technology in adoptable products that consumers not only understand, but desire. This is their true key to success. I’m looking forward to what comes next…

References

Apple Buys Swedish Facial Recognition Company Polar Rose

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things