Change by Design

Author:Brown, Tim [Brown, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

taking time to design

One of the many problems bedeviling the health care system today is “adherence.” Once a doctor has diagnosed a condition, patients often fail to take the prescribed medicine for the duration of the therapy. The pharmaceutical industry is concerned about this for its own reasons: drug companies lose billions of dollars each year because patients give up on their medications. But adherence is a serious medical issue as well. In the phrase of the incurably blunt former Surgeon General C. Edward Koop, “Pills don’t work if people don’t take them!” In the case of chronic conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure, patients risk letting the condition get worse. In other situations—antibiotic treatments of bacterial infections, for instance—they may put others at risk by releasing attenuated drug-resistant microorganisms back into the larger population.

IDEO has worked with several pharmaceutical companies on specific drug adherence regimes. The brief: drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars, often using aggressive marketing techniques, to promote their drugs, only to lose much of the therapeutic, and business, advantage when the patient stops taking them. They are taking a traditional approach to selling a product rather than creating an experience that engages the patient over time. Rather than badgering doctors with unwanted sales visits and the public with obnoxious television commercials, pharmaceutical companies should use design thinking to explore a new approach to the business of pills.

There are three self-reinforcing phases of medical treatment. First, the patient must understand his or her condition, then accept the need for treatment, and finally take action. This time-based “adherence loop” suggests a framework with many different points at which it is possible to provide patients with needed positive reinforcement. We can design better information to educate people about their disease; there could be better methods for dispensing and administering medications; along the “adherence journey” the patient might find support groups, Web sites, and call centers staffed by nurses. The specific set of tools will vary according to the particular disease or treatment, but two underlying principles are the same: first, as with every other type of time-based design project, each patient’s journey through the process will be unique; second, it will be far more effective to engage individuals as active participants in their own stories. Designing with time means thinking of people as living, growing, thinking organisms who can help write their own stories.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.