A good interview with Atul Gawande on how good data can improve healthcare, suing the police experience with ‘hotspots’ to identify community issues and problems, ending up on the challenge of how to use it to change individual behaviour. Quote:
That’s where the art comes in. There are problems because you lack information, but when you have information like “you shouldn’t drink three cans of Coke a day — you’re going to put on weight,” then having that information is not sufficient for most people.
Understanding what is sufficient to be able to either change the care or change the behaviors that we’re concerned about is the crux of what we’re trying to figure out and discover.
When the information is presented in a really interesting way, people have gradually discovered — for example, having a little ball on your dashboard that tells you when you’re accelerating too fast and burning off extra fuel — how that begins to change the actual behavior of the person in the car.
No amount of presenting the information that you ought to be driving in a more environmentally friendly way ends up changing anything. It turns out that change requires the psychological nuance of presenting the information in a way that provokes the desire to actually do it.
We’re at the very beginning of understanding these things. There’s also the same sorts of issues with clinician behavior — not just information, but how you are able to foster clinicians to actually talk to one another and coordinate when five different people are involved in the care of a patient and they need to get on the same page.
That’s why I’m fascinated by the police work, because you have the data people, but they’re married to commanders who have responsibility and feel responsibility for looking out on their populations and saying, “What do we do to reduce the crime here? Here’s the kind of information that would really help me.” And the data people come back to them and say, “Why don’t you try this? I’ll bet this will help you.”
A marriage of data and caregivers gives Dr. Atul Gawande hope for health care – O’Reilly Radar.
