Join us for an update on BIF's Nursing Home of the Future

When the Business Innovation Factory set out to create a real-world laboratory for developing and testing new solutions for improving elderly care, we knew it would be an exciting and challenging endeavor. What we didn't know was how deeply personal and inspiring the process of building the Nursing Home of the Future (NHoF) would be.

I invite you to join us on Wednesday, September 10, 3pm-5pm for a special community update on the NHoF initiative. The update will be held at BIF’s offices in the American Locomotive Works Development on Valley Street in Providence (directions below).

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Posted September 04, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meet a pioneer in surgical robotics and telemedicine: Dr. Richard Satava

I spent the holiday weekend with a close friend from Minnesota who is a physician. I happen to have a BIF-4 flyer lying around (ha-ha) and mentioned to my friend that Dr. Richard Satava was going to be one of our storytellers at the summit in the fall. Initially, the name didn't mean anything to her. Then I said he co-developed the first surgical robot. That's when her eyes lit up: "that's a serious game-changing surgical technology," she said.

I've profiled many storytellers over the years. Satava is prone to neither hyperbole nor rhetoric - but honestly, it's hard to tame down his story.

He's done many things in his life – from deciding which cutting-edge medical technologies the U.S. military will pursue, to saving lives as a surgeon in the heat of battle, to teaching surgery at Yale and the University of Washington, to serving on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy – yet he would have you believe that all his accomplishments stem from one thing: failure.

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Posted July 09, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meet BIF-4 Storyteller Debi Brooks: Medical Research Change Agent

Benjamin Franklin said if you don’t watch your workers, you might as well leave a bag of money in their midst and walk away. Applying this principle of oversight to a group of scientists from esteemed institutions is surprisingly unconventional,. And that's exactly what Debi Brooks, co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research is trying to do.

Brooks will be a storyteller at our upcoming BIF-4 Summit in October where she'll talk about the "shockingly unmonitored" medical research funding process and the new model MJFF has created during the past eight years, positioning itself as a “strategic intermediary” between science and its funders — private philanthropists as well as industry — in an urgent effort to find a cure for Parkinson's disease.

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Posted June 27, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

The MinuteClinic Disruption: Classic story in the 21st century

The Boston Herald ran a story over the weekend about Rhode Island-based CVS’s plans to locate low-cost health care clinics in retail stores in Boston. I'm sure CVS knew they were in for a fight considering the lengths many Rhode Island primary-care physicians have taken to block their efforts to do the same here in our state.

From the article Competition won’t ail you:

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is concerned about CVS’s plans to locate low-cost health care clinics in retail stores in his city. Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene, he has said.

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Posted February 12, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matt Cottam: An Actor Prepares

Matt Cottam is an innovator who I've been crossing paths with on and off recently, but who I'm only meeting for the first time today at BIF-3. He and I first got to know each other when I learned he's a big fan of a gadget that's near and dear to my heart. Matt is an Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design at RISD, but I think of him as a Physical Computing pioneer, someone who is making devices smarter, more fun to interact with, and easier for people to build on their own...

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Posted October 10, 2007 by Brian Jepson | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eyes on the Prize: Creating the Trauma Bay of the Future

Someone made a passing – albeit complimentary – comment to me at lunch yesterday saying, “Oh, you’re with BIF - you guys hold such great events.” OK, it’s true, we do hold great events. But the meat of BIF…the stuff that keeps us going…can be found in our Experience Laboratories. With so many eyeballs on us because of the summit next week. I thought I would take the time to share one of the projects under development in our Patient Lab…

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Posted October 05, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: A Night in the Trauma Bay

For the Trauma Bay of the Future project, our embedded reporter observed several shifts in the Emergency Department Trauma Bay. What follows is a fictionalized account of real events and people. For patient privacy purposes, many of the details have been changed or generalized.

The burly Warwick EMT yells at me as I walk through the door of the Rhode Island Hospital Emergency Department: “Coming through! Make a path!” He is walking back-ward, pulling a gurney. I jump out of the way, amazed that my observation round at the Rhode Island Hospital Emergency Department has taken less than 10 seconds to become a nuisance and an impediment to people doing their jobs.

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Posted September 04, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Getting the Best Ideas for the Trauma Bay

Week 6: Survival of the Fittest

"You must always be mindful that you are taking into account real need, not perceptions of real need," says Aidan Petrie. Aidan is a tall man in pretty good shape with very broad shoulders. In another life, one imagines he would have been terrifying on a rugby field. He has an undeniable, high British accent, but once in a while I detect a vaguely Scottish tinge to it, like when he slides, slightly, over the "t" in "not."

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Posted August 12, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Trauma Bay Ideas Take Shape

Week 5: Creating a Stage

Industrial Designers understand that abstract ideas become clear for users when they are made physically tangible. One of the final outcomes of this project will be a full-on walkthrough of the Resuscitation Bay of the Future, and this week, the team started to assemble one. Apparently there was a line-item in the project budget for this, and so over the course of the week a few pieces of large medical equipment started showing up: the same model hospital gurney used in the resuscitation bay, the same model trash-can, the same model shelving unit, the same model wheeled storage cart.

Of course, some of the devices in an RB cost tens of thousands of dollars. There is no line-item for that, so the team did the next best thing: they printed out huge, blown up pictures of the equipment in question and mounted them on foam core. The overall impression is actually quite immersive. And useful, for getting the proportions and logistics of the current RB environment down.

The whole room mock-up also serves as a framework around which the team can start to assemble prototypes of solutions they’ve come up with for the “family car” expression. The room they built this week is the family car. Soon they’ll get to work on “pimping it out.”

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Posted August 05, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: System Thinking in the Trauma Bay

Week 4: Avenues of Care

The challenge for this week was to figure out how to present the research results thus far to the collaborative partners, and outline the design directions. The preliminary research had yielded an understanding of the stages of the emergency intervention process, and pointed out around 45 observations of opportunity along nine avenues of care provision.

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Posted July 30, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Deep Observation in the Trauma Bay

Weeks 2 and 3: Now, the work begins.

After the whirlwind nature of the first week of this project, the second week was decidedly more sedate. (Research is like that, a lot of the time.) The team commenced work in three major research areas: scholarly and business-derived research online, actual in-hospital observations, and focus groups. While this activity may have been more sedate, less kinetic and on-the-go than the first week, there was still an intense feeling of a group of people diving into the intricacies of an alien environment.

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Posted July 25, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Trauma Bay Team Dives In

“It’s like CPR, but a bit more sophisticated.”

Dr. Nathan Siegel, a progenitor of this project, is a big framed, 39 year old emergency medical physician. He studied Anthropology at SUNY-Buffalo then decided to come to medicine only after he graduated. He spent a few years getting his post-Bac requirements done, then went to Yale Medical School. He did his residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan Hospital, then came to Rhode Island late last year. On Monday afternoon, he gave the design team a guided tour through “Resuscitation Bay 101.”

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Posted July 20, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Trauma Bay Project Kicks Off

Week 1: Chair Irony

As a conference room at Hasbro Children's Hospital began to fill up with potential volunteers, the groan of the cheap plastic and metal chairs grew louder and louder. The chairs, ubiquitous in every office environment in America, are iconic of lowest-common denominator design. They're incredibly uncomfortable, small, and stiff. This is worth noting, at the outset, because sitting in these poorly designed chairs, at these poorly designed tables, were several brilliant young industrial designers and a director for an industrial design firm called Item. The irony was not lost on anyone: already, there was a clear need for better design in the hospital environment.

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Posted July 15, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patient Experience Lab: Innovation in Life-or-Death Terms

How do you create innovation for a completely unpredictable environment? That is the core question in the new project in the Patient Experience Lab, the Trauma Bay of the Future. Over the summer of 2007, the Business Innovation Factory, Item New Product Development, the University Emergency Medicine Foundation (UEMF), and Rhode Island Hospital are rethinking and re-imagining the trauma, or resuscitation bay in the Emergency department.

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Posted July 10, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Math for Electronic Health Records

By now most of us have heard of Electronic Health Records, or alternatively, Electronic Medical Records. Electronic records are a digital copy of our medical visits, test records, prescriptions, and physician’s notes, which have lived in paper form for the past century of medical practice. Many of us have experienced the frustration of getting records from one doctor and hand carrying them to another, showing up at a specialist appointment to find that the fax of your referral didn't arrive, or compiling medical records from multiple doctors and hospitals to coordinate care for an elderly parent or sick child.

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Posted June 14, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (3)

Surgery With a Warranty?

We are always on the lookout for new business models in health care that have the possibility of shaking up the system, and recentering the focus on the patient. Health care in particular struggles with new business models, as the status quo model is so complex, intertwined, and fragmented.

Geisinger, a hospital system in central Pennsylvania, has been running a unique experiment for a year, and just presented their first results to the larger medical community. Borrowing a lesson from other consumer products and services, they have begun offering a 90 day warranty on heart bypass surgeries. The warranty, called ProvenCare, charges more upfront for the surgery, but covers any followup visits or care for complication for the critical 3 months after a heart bypass.

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Posted May 18, 2007 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Innovation in Healthcare: VHA Health Foundation Special Report

The appetite for better heatlhcare systems has never been greater. The VHA Health Foundation (a public foundation created by VHA to promote and disseminate new, effective models that improve health and health care) issued a report last year highlighting several innovative organizations in the healthcare sector. BIF Research Advisor Larry Keeley and his firm Doblin, Inc. helped craft the study. Rather than the usual doom and gloom we read about in the business press, this report is quite good because it offers several solid and sustainable new business models.

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Posted March 19, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

To Put It Together, First Take It Apart

It's little surprise that many of those who would try to make healthcare better are instead intimidated by it. After all, who could have to hubris to think they could "fix" the monolithic American Healthcare System? The leaders of the BIF | RISD Healthcare Innovation Project realized early on that in order to find ways to improve healthcare, even the subfield of primary care, they first needed to deconstruct it.

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Posted November 22, 2006 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Primary Care is Where Its At !

When you pull your car into the parking lot next to Dr. Lynn Ho’s office in North Kingston, Rhode Island, the large white building looks like other suburban medical offices. But enter the waiting room of Dr. Ho's practice and you'll get the feeling that you are not in your usual doctor's office.

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Posted November 15, 2006 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Couples Therapy for Health Care? Maybe !

Everyone working on the BIF/RISD Healthcare Innovation Project agrees that the relationship between patients and primary care physicians needs improvement. But where do you start? The answer may not be obvious to the experts who typically study American healthcare, but it's crystal clear to the designers leading the BIF/RISD team: talk to the customers.

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Posted October 23, 2006 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Customer Centric Health Care? BIF/RISD Collaboration Shifts Into High Gear

For many, the word "design" conjures images of sleek architecture, hip new products, or avant-garde fashion. But for the eight designers leading BIF's Health Care Innovation Project, it wasn't plans for a new building or new product that brought them together last week. It was the prospect of designing a better healthcare system.

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Posted September 08, 2006 by Allan Tear | Permalink | Comments (0)

BIF's Patient Experience Lab Launches New Project

The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) and the Rhode Island School of Design have embarked on a unique effort to understand and improve a pivotal piece in the healthcare puzzle: the interaction between patients and primary care physicians.

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Posted July 17, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

BIF-2 Alert: John Donoghue's Interection of Disciplines

Anyone see the cover of the New York Times yesterday? Headline: Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor. This is big news. A team led by Brown University researcher and BIF-2 storyteller John Donoghue actually turned thoughts into action. Their results, published in this month's Nature, show how a tiny new brain sensor allowed a quadriplegic to open a prosthetic hand, control a robotic limb and move a computer cursor – using thoughts alone.

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Posted July 14, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

SPARC – Designing Better Healthcare

I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Alan Duncan, Director of the SPARC Innovation Lab at the Mayo Clinic a couple of weeks ago. For those unfamiliar, SPARC, which stands for See, Plan, Act, Refine, and Communicate, was created to generate a new set of ways to meet the needs of patients.

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Posted January 24, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)