By Emma Zhu - March 11, 2010
From last October, all the tier-3 hospitals in China, the highest ranked and best equipped public hospitals, were required by the Ministry of Health to provide clinic appointment services. The national initiative of building the clinic appointment system aims to reach these objectives: 1) arrange doctors' agenda better, 2) reduce patients' wait time, and 3) provide better medical consultation. In shorter words, in face of pressing healthcare issues, the government kicks off a service initiative to improve the healthcare efficiency as well as work quality.
Making doctor appointments is common in most developed countries, but it hasn't been put into public use in China before. You can go to the hospital anytime and get a queue number at the outpatient counter. The counter staff then dispatches you to a medical division and you wait outside the diagnosis room till your number is called. Waiting is not a nice thing in any scenario, not to mention when you are feeling sick. Seeing a doctor is like going on a blind date. You don't know who you'll meet and what you would expect in the hospital. All you know is that you feel not well and probably nervous in the medical environment.
By Vincent Salvo - March 2, 2010
In the healthcare device and software industry, the mantra: build it and they will come doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked since Noah built an ark or the movie Field of Dreams was made. Ignoring the user experience is what’s wrong with the healthcare experience and begs for innovation.
By Barbara Pantuso - February 19, 2010
How Evidence-Based Design Leads to Better Patient Outcomes.
“It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their way towards the light; a patient will even complain that it gives him pain ‘lying on that side.’ ‘Then why do you lie on that side?’ He does not know — but we do. It is because it is the side towards the window.”
-Florence Nightingale from Notes on Nursing
By frog healthcare group - October 14, 2009
On Thursday (10/8/09), frog design hosted its third live one-hour conversation on Twitter. The chat was inspired by the Fast Company.com article produced by frog entitled “The Future of Health Care is Social"(PDF), which emphasized that networked devices and connected people will ultimately lead to better health.
By frog healthcare group - August 14, 2009
As a participant in the recent Pacific Health Summit, I was struck by the bold talk of innovative approaches to addressing the global threat of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). And yet few of the projects that were presented involved partners from outside the public health community. (The lone exception at the conference was Chevron, which has made a big commitment to leadership on infectious disease through the Global Business Coalition.) Innovation requires openness. The two go hand in hand.
I was particularly disappointed that there were no mobile operators present, particularly from countries like South Africa and China that are hard hit by TB and increasingly vulnerable to a large scale MDR-TB epidemic (for more background on MDR-TB checkout my first post in this series). Both countries have first-world communications infrastructure and are great proving grounds for mobile health innovation (as we have learned with Project Masiluleke, frog's mHealth partnership that targets HIV/AIDS, a condition that is increasingly linked to TB).
By frog healthcare group - August 3, 2009
I hope I got your attention with my last post about the Pacific Health Summit and the acute global threat of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB). All of the issues around innovation in public health that I are covered in this post need to be placed in the perspective of this challenge and the human costs associated with it.
By frog healthcare group - July 27, 2009
Last month I attended the Pacific Health Summit in Seattle. It is a pretty exclusive venue (aspiring to be the "Davos of Health Care") attended by senior representatives from the world of health care and public policy (such as Dr. Anthony Fauci from the NIH, Dr. Margaret Chan from WHO, Chris Viehbacher CEO of sanofi-aventis and Tadataka Yamada who heads the Global Health program for the Gates Foundation). The conference chooses a specific challenge to focus on each year. This year's topic was Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB)--more about that in a minute.
The venue provided a remarkable opportunity to reflect on the gaps between the promise and "delivery" of innovation. The design and business community have conspired over the last few years to polish up the term "innovation" to a high gloss. It is like Apple chrome now, this shiny gleaming element that can be applied to any surface. But what happens when innovation meets with the messy reality of domains like public health?
By frog healthcare group - July 9, 2009
It's a banality to state that Healthcare IT is hopelessly out-of-date. Actually, hospitals are often full of gleaming new equipment and are constantly upgrading their infrastructure. The problem is that while the assorted blocks of hardware and software in a healthcare system are often very sophisticated in themselves, they typically don't connect to each other, or to their users, in a very effective manner. Printers, faxes, and paper filing cabinets form the real backbone of the system.
By frog healthcare group - June 8, 2009
On Thursday (6/4/09), frog design hosted its second live one-hour conversation on Twitter about Connected Home Health (CHH). Initially, we defined CHH as connected "ecosystems of people, devices, and services to better manage health & wellness at home" but the conversation extended far beyond a definition and generated some innovative ideas for the future of healthcare. (Participants even kept the debate going after the chat had "officially" ended).
By frog healthcare group - June 3, 2009
According to the American Cancer Society, only two-thirds of women 40 and older report having had a mammogram in the last two years. Fear and discomfort are some of the primary reasons women give for avoiding them, and it’s no wonder − mammograms have a reputation for being a cold, uncomfortable and often painful experience. Fellow frog Laura Richardson blogged about her own discomforting experience with her first mammogram here not too long ago.
