SocialQI: Simple Solutions For Improving Your Healthcare

The US ranks near the bottom of all developed countries when it comes to healthcare quality and costs, yet in some pockets of the US we provide some of the best and most effective care in the world. This variation cannot be explained by payers or resources or socio-economic class - it is far simpler than that - what we have here is a failure to communicate. Medical information in this country is routinely restricted and inaccessible - the data stream is either intentionally… (more)

The US ranks near the bottom of all developed countries when it comes to healthcare quality and costs, yet in some pockets of the US we provide some of the best and most effective care in the world. This variation cannot be explained by payers or resources or socio-economic class - it is far simpler than that - what we have here is a failure to communicate. Medical information in this country is routinely restricted and inaccessible - the data stream is either intentionally dammed or left to chance. By engineering new systems to release current information to patients, physicians, and biomedical scientists at the point of critical decision-making, we can simply and elegantly build new communities of learning. By moving from a reliance on knowledge capital (knowledge is power) to a reliance on social capital (collective intelligence) we can drive new models of information flow, learning and healthcare improvement. The only solutions being proposed to 'fix healthcare' either focus on insurmountable policy change or ineffective personal empowerment - the former is too big to ever work, to latter is too small to be sustainable. The real solution is one that leverages the power of the community to re-engineer information flow, learning and healthcare improvement. This book provides a novel roadmap for patients, physicians, and biomedical scientists to turn social networks into communities of change.