Tomorrow is good.
In a weekly column, alternately written by Lucien Engelen, Maarten Steinbuch, Carlo van de Weijer and Daan Kersten, E52 tries to find out what the future will look like. All four contributors are – in addition to their ‘normal’ groundbreaking work – linked to the SingularityU The Netherlands, the organization that focuses on spreading knowledge about technologies that can provide solutions to the problems of our time. This Sunday, it’s Lucien Engelen‘s turn.
By Lucien Engelen
People like Dana Lewis and her husband Scott Leibrand hacked her insulin system, so the pump that manages the insuline automatically, based on glucose measuring, alters the dose if needed.
More and more of these ‘hacks’ appear on the internet, mostly with the hashtag #wearenotwaiting and the website of Openaps. As the former CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Susannah Fox advocates: hack is meant in the original sense of the word: ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’.
As healthcare institutions, professionals and innovators as well as industry, we can learn a lot from this. It gives us a lens on what people need and want and in what direction we could improve our services and products. Of course ‘hacking’ these systems comes with hurdles and challenges and of course not without risks.
I hear an increasing number of stories like these and am curious to find out if we can find out more about them. So my hunch was to try to collect as much of those ‘hacks’ as possible, to see how patients, their family or others help to better manage diseases or illness by inventing additions, alterations or other use as inspiration to innovators to take on the challenge to improve health(care).
And learn from it, discuss about it, debate it actually with that more and more creating a ecosystem with a Quadruple Helix – so not the regular triple helix (Government, Industry and knowledge institutes) but WITH patient, family and informal care right from the start: #patientsincluded.
I’ve created a Pinterest board for hacking health(care), devices, treatments and processes. So please share this post (liking does not share to your network) to reach as many people as possible.
Share it with those you know who are living with a condition and you know of them ‘hacking’ their health(care). Share it also in your community (not only on Linkedin), and let’s see what people are doing to make (their) healthcare better, more sustainable and, most of all, connected to the needs and the experience they would expect.
Yes we can!
