Our IHIEscapeVelocity: 100 million less forgotten humans by 2025

Here’s our audacious health goal:

View Institute for Healthcare Improvement – World Cafe – IHIEscapeVelocity 38479 on Flickr.com

We created it last night at a special World Cafe (not the radio show, the dialogue methodology) led by Somava Stout, MD, from the Cambridge Health Alliance and facilitated by a group of us including myself and Ed Ellison, MD, the Executive Medical Director of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group (@SCPMG).

We started off with a lot of goals we normally think of (in this audience, anyway) including eliminating disparities in life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and preventable mortality, and then this one captured our imagination.

It’s based on the idea that there at least 1 billion people on the planet who are forgotten and have no name, without access to health and opportunity.

I’ll say “why” this captured our imagination from my own perspective:

  • To reach 100 million people by 2025, you need 100 million people to reach one other person – it’s something that can start today
  • Connie Davis (@conniedavis) inspired this thinking when she told us about the census of the homeless in seattle – public health workers spend an evening/night searching for the homeless people all over the city to do a count
  • Trissa Torres from @TheIHI built on this by describing encounters (silent ones) with people on her way to work, people without names
  • Madge Kaplan, also from @TheIHI further built on this by describing a person being “found” and getting a health “plan” (not the insurance kind the life trajectory kind), that could be simple or complex

In my mind, I recognized the impact, because I feel like I have been finding people who are forgotten for most of my career, and as part of two populations, one of the known, and one of the forgotten, myself (Here’s my TEDx talk: ▶ The Embrace of Failure TED EYTAN and REGINA HOLLIDAY TEDxAlvaPark 2012 – YouTube  )

In the last two years, as an ally for people who are transgender, I have been meeting the most exceptional people, who are valued to the people around them and to humanity.

I’m thinking about how this could scale to the point that any person could be given permission to get to know another human being that they normally wouldn’t get to know.

When they know them, there’s the impact of what they discover about the other person, and then there’s the impact of what they learn, which changes the world to help it learn to love better. That’s what happened in Washington, DC last week for this population.

I’ve definitely seen it in my experience (see: Crowdsource Request: Being a transgender ally and unconscious bias | Ted Eytan, MD ), it’s profound, and as I said in my six-word introduction last night (which went as smoothly as I’ve ever seen, by the way): Our generation will change everything.

Photos from last night are below. We’re having this dialogue at the 15 Annual International Summit on Improving Patient Care in the Office Practice and the Community, and you’re invited to comment and add your audacious health goal at http://www.ihi.org/EscapeVelocity , #IHIEscapeVelocity. I’m adding this one 🙂 .

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Ted Eytan, MD