What would healthcare look like if it were in color? A new book tries to find out

Why do hospitals look the way they do, smell the way they do and sound the way they do??

Why do doctors wear white coats? Why is the food so terrible? And is all that beeping really necessary??

Emily F Peters didn’t set out to answer those questions. Her idea was to write a book about how change happens in healthcare, drawing on her marketing and branding work in digital health as well as her personal experience surviving a postpartum hemorrhage in 2016.

But the topic of healthcare reform proved to be unwieldy, too big to cover in just a couple hundred pages.

Instead she kept coming back to her interviews with artists – like Yoko Sen , a musician whose own experience in the intensive care unit led her to create ICU alarm tones that are less jarring to patients and healthcare workers.

And what Peters ultimately got was a history lesson on how healthcare became so sterile (literally and figuratively) in the first place – as well as a peak into how healthcare is coming full circle to its roots.

That idea – that healthcare needs to rediscover its humanity – is now at the center of her soon-to-be-released book, Artists Remaking Medicine.?

The notion that the arts should be part of healthcare isn’t new; a number of medical schools, from Mount Sinai to the University of Texas Health Science Center, have been actively recruiting humanities majors to their programs. Hospitals too have dipped into their operating budgets to fund art displays, healing gardens and performances; the 2000s in particular saw a spike in arts-related spending.?

What’s different now, according to Peters, is the palpable angst and discontent in healthcare, and a desire to make things better for both healthcare professionals and patients.

Of course, it’ll take more than murals to solve a broken system. But Peters said writing the book has made her an optimist that an overhaul is coming – one that’s not just about art, but fundamentally about what it means to be human. Read on below for more of her thoughts. It’s a utopian take, but that’s also the point.

And tell me: How do we bring humanity back to healthcare?

The transcript below has been edited for lengthy and clarity.

LinkedIn News: Why did you write this book?

Peters: I initially started trying to write a book about how change happens in healthcare. [But] I was talking to more and more people at this intersection of art and medicine, and it started to be a different story about how art and medicine have historically always been connected. And it's really just in the last 150 years of modern medicine where we've sterilized that out of our healthcare system. And if they're back together, it starts to solve a lot of the things that we feel are missing in healthcare today.

LinkedIn News: What caused that break?

Peters: It's interesting to use the word ‘sterilized’ because it really is when medicine transformed into germ theory, when we discovered bacteria and infection and we started to have hospitals where lab coats were white and it was to show that everything was clean and sterile and scientific and very, very modern.

That whole transition happened over just 40 years. It happened very, very fast and in some ways it was amazing. We saved so many lives. But in a way, it feels like the start of another era where we're now starting to realize some of the things that we lost in that.

LinkedIn News: What leads you to believe there’s another shift coming?

Peters: It's hard in healthcare to be an optimist and to say things are definitely getting better, but I think a lot of the work in the research that I did in the book was to try to prove to myself that the answer to your question is yes, things are headed in a really good direction, even though it feels that things are difficult and challenging. It's definitely a time of dramatic change and upheaval right now, and it doesn't feel comfortable, but the book has helped me to be much more optimistic about the direction that we're going and also to see it in the historical context. Where we've been is such an anomaly and it's most likely that we will find our way back to this medical system that we've had for literally all of humanity.

LinkedIn News: Give me an example of the shift that you see happening now.

Peters: One of the chapters that's the most tactical around that is this Embodiment, Disability and Puppetry program that is run by a puppeteer, Marina Heron Tsaplina , [whose students were then interviewed by] a doctor, Rana Awdish , the author of [the memoir] In Shock, who's leading the charge around how do we train people to be empathetic physicians.

This program trained medical students on puppetry as a way of getting them [to see that someone is] not just a patient in a bed and a chart. This is a real person.

There are programs like that in medical humanities and narrative medicine that are emerging all across the country. Culturally as well, this idea of medical professionalism is really evolving to where there's a lot more space for people to be talking about burnout, to be talking about mental health, to be talking about their hobbies and their life, and to be seen as full humans, not just as doctors in the white coat.

LinkedIn News: Why is that important?

Peters: I think that when you are not seeing patients as fully human, you are also not seeing yourself as fully human. And that disassociation is something that was taught to medical students for a long time as a survival mechanism. And I think has created a lot of damage in our healthcare system.

There's a doctor, for example, in the book who works at the end of life care and who started singing to her patients. And she talks about how it was very, very awkward but how it became very healing, both to the patients and also to herself who was dealing with these really difficult cases.

When we go to the doctor, we do want, of course, very precise evidence-based care. But we also want somebody to comfort us. And we want somebody to be a full human. The power with art is it allows you to sit in that complexity; art does not demand that things are perfect and that everything is solved.

LinkedIn News: Are there any stories from the book that surprised you?

Peters: Many things that we take [for granted] as being part of healthcare forever were literally just decided by one person 30 years ago.

Like the white coat ceremony, for example. I could picture medieval Florence, physicians receiving their white coats; I just assumed it had been around forever. But it was Norma Wagoner, dean of students at Pritzker School of Medicine in Chicago, who created the ceremony [in 1989], because one of the medical professors had been complaining that students didn't dress professionally enough.?

That entire thing that all medical students now do is younger than I am.

LinkedIn News: What do you want people to take away from the book?

Peters: There's an anecdote at the start talking about science fiction and the reason we have so many dystopian movies is because, functionally, it’s massively cheaper to just take a picture of New York and break all the windows digitally and make it look really bad and sad.

It’s more time consuming and difficult to imagine a positive future. Something that's totally new and different is imagine what could be possible. There absolutely could be a healthcare future that 40 years from now is very, very different than what we have today, and looks totally different and has totally different values.

History has shown us that that is possible.