Photo Friday: Check the Accuracy of Your Message – Have it Drawn For You

KP Panel IFTF Health Horizons

IFTF Health Horizons

While speaking at the Institute for the Future’s Health Horizons’ Spring 2009 Conference (LiveTweets here and more organized here) about Combinatorial Innovation, with William Ruh, Vice President, Cisco Systems, Larry Tessler, from 23andMe, and Mike Liebhold, Senior Researcher from IFTF, I had a great opportunity to have my words documented graphically, by a very talented visual recording artist.

You could look at the product and get a sense of what I was speaking about on behalf of Kaiser Permanente – member/patient as the hub of health care, engaged doctors with their patients, moving ahead together in the interest of those they serve.

Seeing the documentation is also a great check on accuracy – and in fact, it showed an error in my discussion – the “$5 billion Project” attributed to Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect is actually $4.2 billion, which is a big difference in discussing the investment of a non-profit health system in leading edge technology.

I think (and thought) this was a great opportunity. How can a person tell what the audience feels after they tell a story about something like patient empowerment using technology? Extrapolating to the patient-physician encounter, how does a patient know if their physician understood the significance of their story? Seeing the documentation is very powerful, and a visual check on creating the right impression of the work is very innovative, in my opinion.

Thanks a ton to Institute for the Future for hosting a great discussion, and for allowing me to touch base again wtih two of my favorite leaders in the universe, Karl Hoover and Diana Elser, both from Group Health Cooperative, and as of the date of this discussion, now on Twitter (Follow them here: @kmhoover @dlelser and please encourage them to share their experience in this medium…) Welcome aboard!

2 Comments

I agree that the visual display is a great way to check assumptions with a group. I saw a similar use of an artist/cartoonist who listened to a large group physician discussion about strategic forces and opportunities and summarized and captured the info.

Ted Eytan, MD