NSL Blog

Patients Know Best: a new literacy for healthcare

December 1, 2011

I am thrilled that Mohammad Al-Ubaydli of Patients Know Best got to speak at the wonderful The DO Lectures. His message and story is important and critical to WHAT NEXT looks like. PKB is a case history in No Straight Lines. What Mohammad has created is a service and platform that empowers people with chronic healthcare problems to better manage their own healthcare in participation with clinicians. Its benefits are indeed multifaceted. And right now healthcare faces some big challenges, one is that the power of modern medicine is also the powerlessness of professionals, so  it all starts with a What If? question…

What if we could create a service to better manage people’s chronic health care? Reducing; wrong diagnosis, increasing safety, over prescription of drugs, clogging up hospitals and specialist time?

It means pushing past what is conventionally seen as ‘the possible’, or, ‘the only possible way’ so that the innovator/designer can see, describe, conceive and create something new, fresh, novel and highly relevant.

Mohammad demonstrates with PKB HOW TO design for a better world. That capability is about being deeply aware of the needs of ones industry, to be literate in this instance in participatory cultures (NSL principle #1), technologies of cooperation, data, and platforms. Patients Knows Best is designed around people, for people, not in spite of them.

Moreover, Patients Knows Best can do what Microsoft and google cant do. In a time of great austerity, it will not be spending and wasting £12.7bn of taxpayers money. The UK Parkinson Charity directs all its members to PKB because this is where the ‘best’ information exists.

Key insights from Patients Know Best

  1. Literacy in cross-disciplinary thinking and design is key
  2. PKB demonstrates ability to take a whole systems approach
  3. Service built around patient empowerment
  4. It doesn’t cost the earth to design for transformation
  5. PKB demonstrates a new model of organisational capability
  6. A constant process of iteration

If you would like to learn more about designing for a non-linear world, and how to create WHAT’s NEXT for your business – more information below

No Straight Lines Transformation Labs and Breakthrough Innovation workshops

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