Space – The Health Care Blog

Revisualizing and Recoding Healthcare

Jun 20, 2023

BY KIM BELLARD

Two new books have me thinking about healthcare, although neither is about healthcare and, I must admit, neither of which I’ve yet read. But both appear to be full of ideas that strike me as directly relevant to the mess we call our healthcare system.

The books are Atlas of the Senseable City, by Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti, and Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, by Jennifer Pahlka.

Dr. Picon is a professor at The Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Professor Ratti is head of MIT’s Senseable Lab. Drawing on the Lab’s work, they write: “We hope to reveal here an urban landscape of not just spaces and objects, but also motion, connection, circulation, and experience.” I.e. dynamic maps. Traffic, weather, people’s moment-by-moment decisions all change how a city moves and works in real time.

Dr. Picon says.

These maps are a new way to apprehend the city, They’re no longer static. Maps provide a way to visualize information. They’re crucial to diagnosing problems. I think they provide a new depth…It’s a little bit like the discovery of the X-ray. You can see things within cities that were not previously accessible. You don’t see everything, but you see things you were not able to see before.

So I wondered: what would a dynamic map of our healthcare system look like?

I’m telling you, just a map of what happens between drug companies, PBMs, health plans, pharmacies, and patients would open people’s eyes to that particular insanity in our healthcare system. Now repeat for the millions of other ecosystems in our healthcare system. If that kind of dynamic mapping — showing all the complexities, bottlenecks, circuitous routes, and redundancies within the system — wouldn’t lead to health care reform, I don’t know what would.

One Person’s Trash…

Nov 22, 2022• 1

BY KIM BELLARD

Gosh, so much going on. Elizabeth Holmes was finally sentenced. FTX collapsed. Big Tech is laying off workers at unprecedented rates, except TikTok, which should, indeed, be cautionary. Elon Musk’s master plan for Twitter remains opaque to most of us. Americans remain contentedly unworried about the looming COVID wave.

With all that to choose from, I want to talk about space debris. More specifically, finding opportunity in it, and in other “waste.” As the old saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, so one person’s problems are another person’s opportunities.

And, yes, there are lessons for healthcare.

Getting to space has been one of humankind’s big accomplishments. We’re so good at it that earth’s orbit has become a “graveyard” for space debris – dead or dying satellites, pieces of rockets, things ejected from spaceships, and so on. Space is pretty big, but the near-Earth debris is getting to the point when avoiding it becomes an issue for the International Space Station and other orbiting objects.

Scientists now fear that climate change will impact the upper atmosphere in ways that will cause space debris to burn up in it less often, making the problem worse.