A new model for healthcare

I enjoyed this week's article, "Reframing health to embrace design of our own well-being".  It is a call to action for the redesign of every aspect of the healthcare system to allow those who we today call patients to become tomorrow's users of a participatorily-designed structure focused on true well-being, not just being free of disease. Or in the words of the the World Health Organization, health is "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being."

I agree that we need to empower people to take control of their own healthcare. There is a recognizable trend in this direction that I believe started with the rise of the Web – simply having access to more information turned a lot of people off to the traditional model and on to the DIY, holistic side of things. There are merits to both strategies, of course, but we need a merger of the two to really get the most advantage.

The article is also inspiring because it brings the concepts of good design to an area which might not seem hospitable to design practice. Though we usually think of good design in the form of objects or structures, design thinking applies to pretty much every construct in the world, tangible or otherwise. This is why Dubberly's brief introductory paragraph is so inspiring – "wicked problems can be 'solved' only by reframing, by providing a new way of understanding."