Healthcare Hero's Needed

Transforming Healthcare is something that gets talked about quite a lot nowadays. Patients accessing their own records is a step in the right direction, but in reality this is only a small part of a complex picture.

Perhaps what’s needed is a fundamental re-think, imagine the art of the possible through the eyes of a patient. The question should be how do we fundamentally change the engagement with a patient, to deliver a truly personalised and preventative model of healthcare? And how do healthcare professionals, processes, systems, incentives and data align to this grand aspiration in the current climate?

What is needed is for people to come together with true courage, to question and change the system. Challenge the incumbent powerful personalities and systems at a local level, changing the status quo. Healthcare Hero’s are needed.

So what type of mission do our Hero’s embark on?

Our Hero’s working directly with Patients

1. They spend time with patients to understand how to best to engage with them. They look at how they can empower by understanding what motivates them? They help patients embark on a journey of self-understanding through both personal and digital means.
2. They seek to understand how to make the experience engaging and interesting, and enable patients understand the cause and effect of their daily routines. This requires more than just access to their health care record – it requires an understanding of their social circumstances, their health needs, their emotional well being, their support and driving positivity and motivation with them. Working towards enabling them to understand what ‘Good’ looks like and can be for them.
3. They provide them with access to digital resources as well as healthcare services to make things happen.

Our Hero’s working to re-design Healthcare Processes and services

1. They define a healthcare model that supports healthcare prevention and personalisation based upon the patient journey above, that’s engaging and promotes understanding of cause and effect.
2. They develop systems geared around the patient journey. They understand the data generated by a patient acts as powerful enabler for this new model of engagement with a patient.
3. They do not believe that the needs of healthcare organisation process, trumps the needs of a patient experience.
4. They change the definition of ‘Integrated Care’ to ‘incorporate engaged, empowered patient preventative and personalised Healthcare Delivery’, over and beyond consolidation of healthcare organisations and systems for cost savings.
5. They stop the commissioning of services that don’t incorporate engaged, preventative, empowered patient delivery – and mandate digital engagement in healthcare service delivery from providers.

Our Hero’s working to re-design Healthcare Technology

1. They break information monopolies of the current incumbents.
2. They liberate the locked sources of healthcare data and work towards a seamless patient experiences across different settings.
3. They put patient generated data at the core of any system.
4. They halt the development and implementation of systems that are not driven by engaged patient journeys – that are not geared around prevention and personalisation.
5. They fundamentally embrace the digital world for patients and provide them with the tools and the information and the mode of fun engagement that allows them to interact with their health in a fundamentally different way.
6. They move systems and processes to a more real time environment, where issues and exacerbation's around a patient’s life are diagnosed early.
7. They develop real time monitoring centres shared across different health providers covering whole health localities – which act as the nerve centre of health prevention. These prevention monitoring centres work on the data generated by patient engagement, where information flows from a patient into a proactive and preventative healthcare system.
8. They engage patients in their own world of Big Data – but the ‘Big’ being their own individual world powered by the internet of things and devices.

Our Clinical Hero’s

1. They will be championing the new preventative world order, whilst grappling with the current demands.
2. They are supported and encouraged in this new world, and provided with the resources they need.
3. They are given new incentives to work differently, and have the courage to try them.
4. They are given the support to manage their current workloads and attempt to work in new ways alongside the status-quo with patients.
5. The galvanise together to defeat the blockers, and create a culture of co-operation and openness.

There are heroes everywhere, indeed some have recently been acknowledged at the NHS Innovation Challenge Prizes, however the change required is radical and we are just beginning to enable this via the patient.