Bridging Digital Technology and Humanity to Help Transform Healthcare

November, 2018

Harvard Business Review recently published an article I authored called Keeping Human Stories at the Center of Health Care.

The article is about finding ways to intersect digital technology and a focus on humanizing healthcare so we can build (or rebuild) trusted relationships between patients and clinicians. Those relationships are the epicenter of healthcare and healing ecosystem. To drive transformation and an ideal future of caring, here, with relationships, is where we need to start.

Actions for Transformation

The article discusses a full complement of actions we – doctors, nurses, healthcare leaders, and cross-industry allies – need to take to enable transformation. Following is a synopsis of those actions:

• Place the well-being of patients and care teams at the top of the list for every initiative we undertake and every technology we introduce.
• Use a metric for well-being before and after a new technology is deployed to assess its impact on operational efficiency and clinician relationships and well-being.
• Ensure that the patient’s story and voice – the best diagnostic tools we have – are not lost in technology but, rather, stay front and center in the patient’s treatment plan.
• Train the skill of well-being in med school and nursing school, while also doing the hard work of eliminating the preventable trauma of administrative and bureaucratic hassles in a clinician’s day.

National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare

The National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare is actively working to rebalance our focus on technology and humanity in healthcare. We are taking action in three key ways:

1. Change the dialog from one that sees burnout as a personal psychological failing to acknowledgement of a system in distress. Reframe to shift the aim from preventing burnout to creating a system that supports purpose, well-being, and joy.
2. Adopt a metric for humanity that focuses less on deficit measurement (burnout), and more on understanding the causes and positive outcomes of emotional health and emotional resilience.  
3. Create a blueprint for change that supports a systematic shift in culture toward a human-centered care system.

Technology, when designed for the right reason and used in the right way, has tremendous value in healthcare. And it is time to understand that value and the impact technology can have on humanizing healthcare by measuring how it improves the lives of clinicians, patients and their families.

I encourage you to read the full article in Harvard Business Review.