• Building on a tradition of inclusion. Kaiser Permanente leader tapped for diversity award. - The combination of leadership in information technology, diversity, and member-centeredness is ideal for a health care professional (I’m projecting - it’s the ideal career for me :)); it's a powerful combination for an organization, as well. Congratulations, Kaiser Permanente.

Design Thinking, Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review, June, 2008

Rachel Block, the Executive Director of the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC - pronounced “nice” - get it?) alerted me to this article in the June, 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It’s available for free on their Web site now, so waste no time in getting it.

The article is written by the CEO and President of IDEO, Inc., and talks about several projects that created value for customers using design thinking. The first project described is one at Kaiser Permanente, where, through this approach, nurses changed their rounding strategy to “at the patient’s bedside” instead of “at the nurse’s station.” This in and of itself was striking to me, because it’s exactly the approach that other national leaders in patient and family centered care are pursuing. How great that the same conclusion was reached about where nurses can best serve patients.

Beyond the great health care example, there are other examples that demonstrate the same thing:

Many of the world’s most successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired by a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and use the principles of design to innovate and build value.

As Diana Forsythe discussed in her article on creating a patient education system for migraine sufferers, the most valuable innovations are the ones that understand the lives of the people they will touch, and then support those lives with the product/service/technology to make things better, rather than the other way around. To me, understanding the lives of the people that innovations touch means going to where those lives’ experience happen, and bringing the people who feel the impact into the design of the innovation.

I happen to have been to the Kaiser Permanente Garfield Innovation Center in Oakland, California (here’s a post about it and a little about its namesake, Sidney Garfield, MD), where we received a demonstration of the IDEO process underway on a project in one of the Kaiser Permanente Hospitals. I brought my most critical LEAN goggles with me to assess the process for respect for patients and those who serve them, and I was very favorably impressed. The Garfield Center is an impressive place in general, if you look at the photos in the post, or get a chance to visit yourself.

The theme of patient (and community) involvement in the design and leadership of systems has been on my mind in the next phase of work I am doing, hence these posts. I am glad that there are people like Rachel who know me well enough to add the right fuel to the fire….Enjoy the article and please post your thoughts on what it means for what you do.

• Accessing Health Records Online 205562-7 : C-SPAN Video Library, Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service. - Jack Cochran, MD, Executive Medical Director of Kaiser Permanente talks about online medical records.

• Emerging Technology | Computers | DISCOVER Magazine - Article on Valdis Krebs’ social networking mapping tool
• orgnet.com - Social network analysis software & services for organizations, communities, and their consultants - This came up today, a reminder of past explorations
• Regional Health Education Online Learning - The Permanente Medical Group - Online, freely available training around patient self-management, provided by the Kaiser Permanente Community benefit. I took a look at the video on chronic conditions. I think this is a good direction in terms of training. I think there are also opportunities, though, to better demonstrate patient-centered care in this medium, including use of the electronic health record (I’m supposed to think that, it’s what I do, after all).
• Portrait Professional - amazing photo enhancer - Could this be the next Internet maps craze?
• Rite Aid adds clinics in Washington, Baltimore - Washington Business Journal: - Rite Aid adds clinics in Washington, Baltimore, working with Medstar Health

February 4th through February 6th:

• DC Moves for Safer Sidewalks - Get There - Washington government takes a step toward promoting walkability. Sidewalks stay open for business.Walkers rejoice!
• Apple //c - a photoset on Flickr - The OOB experience of an unopened AppleIIc computer. Remember when technology was fun? It still is. And I never even learned to program in Pascal.
• Ryanair’s Changing Altitude - Efficient cost management and charging for everything keeps margins high at RyanAir - a great example of “copy how we think” in terms of being like Southwest
• Running a hospital: More on fetching and work-arounds - BIDMC launches an improvement methodology called SPIRIT. Looks like it’s at least partially based on LEAN?
• The Health Care Blog: Bad Medicine: How The AMA Undermined Primary Care in America - Brian Klepper - Analysis of RBRVS and impact on primary care.
• The ethics of CEO blogging - Nice discussion from Paul Levy about the approach that a CEO takes to blogging. I’m in support!
• Insurers Begin To Reimburse for Online Visits, Concerns Remain - Nice profile of Kaiser Permanente’s program.
• Marriot Rolls Out Web-Based PHR System to Employees Nationwide - iHealthBeat - An employer-sponsored PHR. Will the lack of connection to the health care team be an issue?
• KUOW: Program Archive: Patient Safety, January, 2008 - Dr. Matt Handley, from Group Health Cooperative, is featured
• Best Companies 2008 - FORTUNE Magazine’s Top 100 Employers to Work For - The 2008 list is out. From an HR/Leadership perspective, it is interesting to look at some of the most important qualifications for being on the list, such as support for diversity.

December 16th through December 18th:

• Edelman Trust Barometer - a “person like me” is more trusted than a physician
• Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): Blogging policy examples - Examples of organizational blog policies
• Managing Health Online Discussed on NPR?s ‘Talk of the Nation’ | Kaiser Permanente News Center - KPNewsCenter coverage of NPR Talk of the Nation, December 13, 2007
• St. Louis-Based Company Attracts Gen. Y Grads — and Used Car Customers - George?s Employment Blawg: St. Louis labor & employment lawyer looks at HR, labor law, and today?s workplace - Example of a company that is catering to GenY - Enterprise rent-a-car
• Secretary Mike Leavitt’s Blog: Electronic Medical Records and the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate - The Administration proposes a requirement of EHR’s at the same time the SGR is fixed. The comments on this post are worth a read as well.
• Permanente Journal - Summer 2006 - Special Issue - Sidney Garfield Centennial, one of the fore-parents of health informatics