Skip to main content

An Innovation Video From C.K. Prahalad

What if...? Why not...? Medically indigent or market opportunities?

What if everything you knew about the world's poor was wrong? What if you re-framed the issue instead of thinking about them as 'someone else's problem' (assuming you thought of them at all?) What if you cast off old notions about global poverty and discarded shop-worn solutions? What if everywhere you looked, you saw, not problems, but challenges to innovate?

Here's a short Fast Company video featuring C.K. Prahalad discussing GE's development of a new, lighter, cheaper EKG machine...




Why not apply the same thinking to YOUR community's indigent care 'problem?' Why not take a blank sheet of paper, cast off everything you know about health care as 'big business' and unlearn all you know about spider webs of regulation and strangling systems of guilds and castes?

Why not, for a moment, ignore that thick binder of policies and procedures, the attitude of 'we're so smart we must know best...'? Why not design something centered around human beings...something that might turn YOUR indigent care 'problem' into a new market 'opportunity?'

4 billion people around the world are considered 'poor.' GE went to rural India and found innovation-driven new markets. You may just need to go around the block.

(P.S. The video opens with a Comcast commercial. Ignore it. I hate them.)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more