What do Mad Men and littering have to do with healthcare? For Wil Yu, they provide insight into the path to a different kind of healthcare experience that’s built around the patient’s voice.
Yu, a former special assistant of innovations at the ONC who’s now a director at the Foundation for Healthcare Innovation, said he found a great example of the social-cultural change that needs to happen around patient engagement from watching an episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper and his family carelessly throw trash from their picnic on the ground of the park.
That was just the accepted way of doing things back then, much like the healthcare industry, over time, has fallen into certain processes and behaviors that are just part of common practice today. To change those behaviors, we can take some lessons from what changed people’s thoughts about littering several decades ago.
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Yu attributed that change in culture around littering to a series of private and public sector campaigns, popular culture, legislation, visible leadership, research initiatives and educational programs that emerged between 1950 and 1980.
Could those same things inspire social-cultural change around patient engagement? And will it take as long as it did back then?
In a keynote address Wednesday at MedCity’s ENGAGE, Yu outlined six necessary steps to a culture that encourages educated, empowered and involved patients:
- personalized communication that speaks at an emotional level
- focus on belief, mindset and outcomes for all stakeholders
- incentives
- visible leadership
- clear opportunities for participation
- research & technology
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It’s tempting to think that with the technologies and communication tools we have today, cultural acceptance of patient engagement won’t take three decades. But Yu reiterated that it’s not enough just to have or to implement new technologies.”They actually have to lead to behavioral and cultural change.”
