our own system

One of CareMore’s critical insights was the application of an old systems-management principle first developed at Bell Labs in the 1930s and refined by the management guru W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s: you can fix a problem at step one for $1, or fix it at step 10 for $30. The American health-care system is repair-centric, not prevention-centric. We wait for train wrecks and then clean up the damage. What would happen if we prevented the train wrecks in the first place? The doctors at CareMore decided to find out.

CareMore is awesome. Healthcare delivery doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas, or even a shortage of ideas that work, it suffers from unwillingness. I love when interventions that demand more staff and more tools and more effort work. By “work” I mean financially beneficial to providers. Sooner or later the powers that be will know it too and the incentives will begin to shift.

Doreen Lorenzo:

Conviction-driven thinkers on all levels of an organization, from the C-suite to executive assistants, want to share their specific visions more than they seek fame or power. They don’t just think they have a good idea, but they believe passionately that their concept is worth making real. The beauty of these types of thinkers (and doers) is that they can explain why they want to develop the products they’re developing, and why they want to launch initiatives that they’re launching—both internally and to the world. Even when their ideas might not be the most original (remember, the Kindle was not the first e-reader; the iPod was not the first MP3 player; Google was not the first search engine; Facebook was not the first social network), their passion and their vision on how to improve the world or even the everyday quality of life in your company’s workspace are likely focused. They are likely engaged. As a result, they can be very persuasive. Such a mixture of focus, engagement, and persuasion, more than creativity alone, is what brings ideas to market, and also to the right audiences at the right time.

Matt Berg, mobile health technology director for ChildCount+ was asked a question by Samantha Michaels:

What’s something that most people just don’t understand about your field?

What’s possible. I think we’re still just wrapping our heads around what universal connectivity will ultimately mean. By universal connectivity, I’m referring to a state where the majority of people in the world are connected to the Internet with what amounts to a full multimedia computer in their pockets. Just think about that! It will happen sooner then we realize, and it will have huge social, economic, and developmental ramifications.