Edition 20: Leveraging Diverse Skills, Experiences, and Perspectives to Transform Modern Healthcare: Insights from the Group Of Humans
The traditional approach to healthcare is broken. Group Of Humans is uniquely positioned to help reshape that approach and create new perspectives on what healthcare can and should be.
Rob Noble, Founder of Group Of Humans explains:
As HUMANS we aren’t beholden to particular technologies or agendas. Our superpower comes in our diversity, so we can look at a particular problem through many eyes and many perspectives. This creates new opportunities to innovate that you don’t get in traditional company structures, because it’s not cost effective to have all those different people employed in any particular vertical.
Here, we’ve brought together a TRIBE of HUMANS who collectively have decades of experience working in what you could loosely define as the ‘healthcare sector’, but in many different and diverse ways. Our focus is on how we utilize our deep collective knowledge and experience to incite real, effective change.
Healthspan Aspiration
Strategic Partner, Adrian Barrow is focussed on the emerging healthspan aspiration: a vision for adding life to our years, not just years to our life.
Humankind’s generations-long obsession with extending our lifespans is slowly being reevaluated and a new vision is emerging, one that focuses on healthspans – living our years with vitality and purpose rather than just trying to live longer.
Activism for activity rather than survivalism for longevity. Because modern prosperity is measured less and less by how long you live, and more and more by how well you live.?
This dynamic shift in thinking should be causing more shockwaves through the traditional approach to healthcare (the United Nations calls it a longevity revolution). While it’s already creating a surge in scientific and technological discovery, from gene engineering and DNA profiling to round-the-clock health monitoring through devices like Apple Watch and Oura Ring, there are still barriers few if any companies have been able to successfully traverse.
Empowering Patients Through Design
Creative Partner, Séan Carney spent 12 years working with Philips, seven of them as GM Business Leader for its Healthcare Transformation Services. His focus lies in empowering people to take control of their own healthcare through better, patient-focussed experience design.
One of the reasons the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, who have launched healthcare ventures and put billions into them, haven’t really cracked it is because no one tech company can go end to end and own it all.?
And neither can a device company like Phillips, because you need multiple vendors, multiple sources of equipment. And somehow we've got to find a way to integrate all of this into an end-to-end digital proposition. And that's where it keeps falling between the cracks. And then it gets locked into government policies around privacy and personal data, security… All of those kinds of issues keep tripping everybody up, so innovation just grinds to a halt, or we complete only very small pieces of the puzzle. Things are moving forward but we don't really feel it yet as an individual, as a patient.
Séan’s work in distributed healthcare is already having an impact on patients in the US, Netherlands and, in particular, Japan.
We worked with Toyota to build mobile hospital clinics that can go out to people’s homes on demand. We put a fleet of ten Toyota Hilux vans out as an MVP to trial it. They loved it so much they’ve extended the model into railway stations, creating health kiosks where commuters can plan visits around their commute, so they don’t lose time away from work. Just book a 15-minute body scan for the morning on the way to work, and on your way home spend another 15 minutes picking up your results and getting any prescription you might need.
This kind of creative collaboration could be the key to healthcare having a more direct impact on people’s lives. By taking away centric care and instead putting it where people are, where it’s convenient for them like shopping malls and railway stations, that’s going to have a profound effect on wellness, early detection and prevention. You’re not waiting till you get super ill before you go to the hospital, you’re out shopping in Walmart or Tesco and you can quickly drop in to get yourself checked out much sooner.
Digital Transformation In Home Healthcare
Strategic Human, Paul Bishop has spent 25 years defining digital strategies and innovating digital products and services that genuinely impact people’s lives. In his work with digital first home healthcare company Cera, he’s seen firsthand the impact of convenient, transparent healthcare.
Working in home healthcare, the question was, simply, how can we use technology to make a better experience for carers and their customers (patients)?” Paul oversaw a complete digital transformation of Cera’s home healthcare process, building an app for carers, customers and their families that fostered transparency, trust and communication. Then they went a step further, “We started doing psychographic matching of carers to customers to help make sure they’d get on, which was one of the biggest issues Cera faced. It was great for the business as it reduces cost, but even better for the customer as their carer will become an important part of their lives, so they need to get on.
The healthcare bug has taken hold and is becoming Paul’s primary interest.
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I’m now working with a healthcare startup that’s worked out how to do a blood test with more than 400 different health indicators in just seven seconds. They’ve created this for paramedics to get super early diagnosis on patients with potentially life threatening illnesses, but I’m looking at it from a consumer perspective for things like fertility tests or haemochromatosis, which is an unbelievable opportunity. Taking something that seems complex and simplifying it so it has real world impact is a powerful thing.
Preventative Health And Global Development
The impact of health and activity is the core foundation of Strategy Human, Sarah Kay’s life. A health fanatic, Sarah is obsessed with preventative health to extend her personal wellbeing and health span using health data and hacking.
I grew up in a country that had free healthcare. I now live in a country that has the most expensive healthcare in the world. I have first-hand experience of the before-during-after healthcare ‘consumer journey’ in multiple countries around the world.?
Human Futures Tribe
The HUMAN FUTURES TRIBE has been exploring provocations and patterns around the future of health and healthspans. Design Partner, Alex Smith explains:
Using Blue Zones as a starting point, we’ve been critically imagining futures that go from empowering the individual on their health journey to exploring how community and connection help keep people healthy and provide a higher quality of life.
The scenarios we’ve been developing explore how ambient computing and exhaust data might be coupled with community, customized drug delivery and remote sensing technology. Through that exploration we’ve surfaced a number of issues and patterns relevant to the design of healthcare today. The crucial and thorny issues that have arisen in all the futures we’ve developed concern the limits of automation and AI, and the complexity of data sharing. Based on research we believe that clarity in these areas will yield outsized gains for the healthcare industry and longer healthspans for individuals and communities.
The HUMAN FUTURES TRIBE is a multidisciplinary group of designers (strategists, systems designers, UX/UI, product designers, creative directors and full time futurists) tracking signals that describe the trajectories of possibility we all move through. We use a mix of old fashioned ideation, AI and bespoke frameworks to chart those trajectories, explore futures for our clients, and steer them toward the more desirable ones.
Group Of Humans' Focus
Group Of Humans is about empowering healthcare for HUMANS by HUMANS. We're focused on and uniquely positioned to help humanize the healthcare experiences for patients and providers. While healthspan is the framework that informs our point of view, there are three areas we believe are key to transformation, and on which we’re concentrating our efforts:
Group Of Humans
We are a globally distributed community of creative leaders and change architects unrivaled in experience and expertise, unmatched in efficiency and results. We can help unlock the real transformative potential of your organization.
Group Of Humans is built on an innovative community platform designed to cater to the evolution of creative and strategic work. We do not work to any traditional business or agency model but are holacratic, distributed and diverse, not just geographically but also creatively and philosophically.?
We work cooperatively in bespoke TRIBES, built on demand to meet specific challenges. Adaptable and scalable, we combine our talents, viewpoints and experience to create fresh perspectives and meaningful solutions that meet global challenges and move humanity towards better outcomes.
We exist to reveal, rewrite and revolutionize the way humankind experiences the Earth (and the Moon) with purpose and meaning.?