Healthcare Innovations Can Improve Education
Countries rich and poor are struggling to solve the challenges of healthcare. The dual challenges of making healthcare affordable and accessible. The only way forward is to reimagine healthcare to focus on health rather than on sick care.
According to the New Yorker, GoFundMe is becoming the place where people are requesting donations from strangers to meet the medical expenses of their loved ones. United States has the highest over-all health-care costs in the developed world. Since 2008, health-insurance deductibles have increased eight times as quickly as wages. A study in The American Journal of Medicine last fall found that 42.4 per cent of the 9.5 million people diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2012 had depleted their assets within two years.
How would we think about healthcare if there were no hospitals? In the book The Healthcare Gamechangers, the author, attempts to share a dozen examples of entrepreneurs who are changing the rules that govern healthcare today. You may recall that Dr Ashwin Naik (@Ashwinnaik) made healthcare accessible and affordable through his hospital chain Vaatsalya in tier II and tier III cities.
Each story in the book is inspirational. Education, like healthcare needs to become relevant and affordable. Maybe the first step of that is to reimagine education through a new string of relations, how Iora Health has solved for this.
Relationship based healthcare
Too much of the power rests in the hands of a few – the medical practitioners. Everybody else, from the patient, to the nursing staff or the family or the community plays an insignificant role. The patient interacts with the doctors for just around 10% to 25% of the time. Primary care is a team sport says Dr Ashwin Naikin his book The Healthcare Gamechangers.
When Iora Health wanted to improve patient care while reducing costs, they created “health coaches”. The coach manages the relationship with the patient on an on-going basis. The health coaches come from a variety of backgrounds. They are selected primarily on their ability to empathize with the patient and their families.
Letting the doctor use their limited time to diagnose and prescribe the treatment. The health coach works in the patient’s home to build trust and provide emotional support. The health coach motivates the patient to stay on track and work towards recovery. The health coach becomes a role model who also impacts the family. It improves the patient experience and brings down the overall cost of healthcare by avoiding unnecessary procedures.
Instead of chasing high-income patients, Iora seeks out the low/middle income group and the elderly. The long-term answer is to look at lifestyle and make changes early so that it keeps people healthy. Iora has care teams that take to take care of the health of the community. The “client service team” provides care coordination. The health coach creates a relationship-based model of health care.
Imagine doing the same for education, especially primary education in the poorer communities.
Applying the lessons to education
What has worked for healthcare can work for education. The challenges are the same. The same four approaches can be applied especially for India.
Expand the number of players
The first is to go beyond the doctor and build a larger ecosystem to improve patient care. That means involving the technicians, the nurses, the patient, the families and the community. Imagine having education-coaches in the community whose role is to empathize with the learners and motivate them not to drop out of school
Expand the playground
Move healthcare from the walls of the hospital to homes, train stations, malls and churches. It creates a two-way flow of ideas and steps up innovation. The same approach can work for education. Taking education beyond the schools can create a impact at scale.
Learn from experts beyond healthcare
Inviting experts from other areas like management, technology, design etc helps to step up innovation. It connects the healthcare ecosystem to other ecosystems and exponentially expands the solutions possible. The approaches that have worked in other ecosystems can be brought to speed up innovation.
Change the rules of the game
Can healthcare be all about overall well-being and not about recovering from disease. To achieve this the individuals must focus on overall well-being. In education this translates to the question, “How do we move the conversation away from degrees to learning?”
Applying it to education
As machines are automating routine tasks that have been done by humans, the joblessness problem can be addressed only by reimagining how we learn. Education has been an entirely cerebral process. To drive change in mindsets, providing information is ineffective. Changing oneself takes courage. It needs persistence. By taking the lessons from healthcare and applying it to education, we may do what is missing. We can put the heart into education.Here is a Sketchnote for you. Right click and download it
Why coaching classes are proof that education is failing the children <read this>
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