Here went the intro for the Disrupter Connection episode for Sept.25, 2020 from the global community Disruptor League.
“Despite all the gee-whiz technology, our healthcare system is functionally obsolete. It’s past time we dismantle the status quo to make way for a future that values patients over profits and outcomes over activity. But first, says Dr. Zayna Khayat, we must let go of longstanding institutions, systems, ways of thinking, language, and ways of working.”
Healthcare is one of those subjects that for some time, even in a pre-COVID world, has been up for assessment, the quality of it, the dysfunctions, the inequities, the cost and the value or worth of it and the future of it as a system that serves us in our quest for healthy lives. For everyday people, as an experience, healthcare is a frontline public system, which includes our interactions with doctors, nurses, personal support workers, in hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities.
Of course, there is much more loaded into the makeup, design and infrastructure of healthcare as we may also see it as an industry, an investment sector, a commodity or, lest we forget, a profession. All of that is for another post. As a real-time everyday experience, our connection with healthcare is necessary for our health and well-being. You feel sick; you call a doctor and/or you go to a pharmacy for some medicine, prescribed or un-prescribed. You need surgery; you go to a hospital.
We know there are systems variations in developed countries such as Canada, the UK, the USA, Europe; and we have differing responses to this question. If we consider how stressed our healthcare systems had become before, we certainly know how much more stress tested they have become in a COVID world. With this in mind, I was curious to hear what the Disruptor League presented in their Zoom event: The Creative Destruction of Healthcare.
Zayna Khayat is the Future Strategist for SE Health and co-author of their book from earlier this year, The Future of Aging.Following her writing and speaking over the last few years, though one might call her an innovative disruptor and futurist, I see her as a thought provocateur, someone who likes to throw the cat among the pigeons in a conversation. So she did delightfully and provocatively on the webinar.
For the purpose of the conversation with Shawn Nason, Lead Disruptor at the Disruptor League, Khayat broke down the creative destruction of healthcare into three elements in her “open file” – Language, Organizational Theory and Business Models. After front-ending her talk with a nod to Joseph Schumpeter who popularized the term creative destruction as related to economics a hundred years ago, Zayna stroke out the over used term innovators and used disruptors, making the point that healthcare is once again going through an “industrial mutation” period.
You can pick up from there on Zayna Khayat’s journey of thinking in the video link above. You will see that this process of disruption or destruction is not a reckless one; it’s a methodology that takes into account what is working as well as what is not – for the times we are in and for future turbulence we may sense we are heading into. The process is not easy.
For here, I want to focus on the first element of creative destruction that Zayna calls “linguistic relevance”. Why start here? My playful way around thinking and driving change to any previous norms in systems has always been to reframe with new language. Somehow, this moves thinking to a new and better place. In reframing Healthcare, Zayna pops up three groups of words to play with – banned words, morphed words and a new lexicon.
For brevity, here is but one that has been on my pet peeve list for some time. Banned word – Bedside. Bedside care. Just as a start, I have thought for some time – why have governments in their promise of improving long-term care (LTC) policy persisted to use increasing “beds” as the goal, why not something like improving the design of “living spaces” in LTC.
As Zayna said it provocatively, “bedside bothers me so much…that assumes the bed is the unit, the currency and the obsession. It should be considered a failure of healthcare if people are sitting in a bed all day; that’s like being proud of your prison beds.”
“Language is a mind-set” as Zayna says, “the words you use is what you are… in healthcare we use so much motherhood words….” Even the word care is up for grabs, “Care implies you are doing it to somebody, for somebody… the new language is around coach, enable someone…where it should be more of an empowerment framework… patient centered becomes people powered.”
If anything this fast paced Disrupter Connection episode will force you to be asked like a 007 – How will you take your Healthcare – shaken or stirred? Either choice – you may be disrupted or disturbed. Seventeen minutes into the video presentation, you will be prompted to think your way through the other words on Zayna’s hit list moving towards a new lexicon for healthcare.
Meanwhile as we move from wrestling with the language of healthcare, what we should most significantly ask now is – what are we willing to invest in as a society, as we deconstruct and reconstruct the front-line systems we have known up to now? Healthcare. Its future is in our line of sight now more than ever.