3 Things ...

In keeping with the interdisciplinary and creative nature of our work, another "3 Things" that recently brought us delight and/or wonder. Enjoy!

Stanford University professor and author Tina Selig.

Check out Startup Grind’s recent podcast with Tina Selig on “Engineering a Culture of Creativity.” Tina Selig is a distinguished author and Stanford professor – but most of all she’s just crazy smart and on-point when it comes to the issue of creativity. If you want to cut through all the nebulous talk on innovation to get to the heart things, listen (and read) Selig. We consume a lot of this sort of stuff, but Selig is in a class of her own. Love, love, love this discussion! #trypod

Tina Selig on Startup Grind

OK, truth be told, we read this book a while ago – but the story lingers. The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas is one of the most powerful narratives about hate, ignorance and – ultimately – redemption that we’ve read. This true story of a Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant who commits himself to forgiveness and compassion for the Texan white separatist who shot him in a vengeful rage post 911 is an urgent and eloquent story that explores the depths of isolation of those living on the margins of society – and the possibility for understanding. This is a book you’ll never forget.

From dogs getting into the trash, dogs shredding up their beds, to dogs eating a bunch of pop tarts, these are just a few of the guilty dogs you'll find in this guilty dogs video compilation. The Pet Collective is home to the top trending clips, most entertaining memes, and funniest animal videos online.

And, finally, because guilt is a feeling most of us understand … The Pet’s Collective’s compilation of Guilty Dogs. You will see yourself in there somewhere– and just maybe laugh out loud.

“There’s A Fundamental Disconnect of Healthcare With Where People Really Are in their Lives.”

Former TEDMED editor Pritpal Tamber was an MD frustrated by the lack of empathy he felt innovators showed towards people’s lived realities. He’s decided to do something about that.

Pritpal S Tamber (facing) speaking with Tony Iton, Senior VP for Healthy Communities at The California Endowment.

Growing up in a working-class community in England, Pritpal S Tamber was “a nerd with good exam results.” Those results led him to medical school – and from there a winding career path that took him from medical journals to tech startups to where he is today – as a healthcare visionary, co-founder and CEO of Bridging Health & Community.

In an industry with no shortage of talk around innovation and patient-centered care, Tamber comes across as the real deal – deeply thoughtful, inquisitive, critical and full of genuine concern.

He’s also the kind of guy who demands to be heard. He speaks with passion and urgency about his frustrations as a medical professional and the enormous opportunities for improvement in a field that he feels talks about innovation a lot without delivering.

But let’s go back.

Entering medical school, Tamber expected an intellectually stimulating environment that would open the doors of his mind, but instead found a system governed by textbooks that was “deeply unsatisfying.”

“You spend six years getting an education to work in a system that nobody really endorses and everyone tells you is crap,” he said. “They put you in a cage – and that always jarred me.”

In this fourth year of studies Tamber won a scholarship at the British Medical Journal where he learned the importance of peer review, editing and clinical information.

“It was the first time I felt liberation – getting underneath the assumptions of the system and the textbooks you have to learn to what is knowledge,” he said. He graduated a year later and started clinical practice, serving a couple years before he was asked to join a publishing company in 1999 called BioMed Central, one of the first of its kind in internet publishing. There he spent five years figuring out how to widen the distribution of knowledge within the field and pursuing “the utopian idea that everyone should have access to knowledge.”

“The amount of barriers is phenomenal,” he said. “It was eye opening to me how existing systems stop change – change that might offer societal good but have no commercial implications for the existing system.”

““It was eye opening to me how existing systems stop change.””

Tamber went into clinical publishing that was integrated with EMR systems and confronted the challenge of structuring knowledge in a way that aids real-time clinical decision making. He learned that the IT infrastructure required for knowledge to be useful was not there, but the system was brilliant for billing. “They’re basically billing systems with a clinical interface on top.”

The experience also led Tamber to other conclusions regarding the application of technology in healthcare. Most importantly, he discovered it’s incredibly hard to improve how a health system works with just knowledge and IT – no matter how good it is. “There’s all sorts of relationship stuff that needs to be worked on outside of anything you can do with IT.”

“When you look at innovation in health it’s all tech-driven, but trying to make any real change is all about improving relationships within that system. In a technocratic world people forget that relationships are at the core of complex systems.”

Tamber became interested in the bigger question: What stops innovation? He decided it had less to do with whether or not there was venture capital available and the mechanics, and more about the human side.

So he quit his job to become a consulting VP of medicine to startups trying to get to clinical innovation.

There he found that while he could help people figure out how the technology works, they almost always got the value proposition – the story – wrong.

Around that time Tamber was approached by TEDMED to become their physician editor. He put together their 2013 program. Working for an organization that was more interested in ideas than innovation per se proved to be an interesting intellectual exercise. “An idea doesn’t necessarily have to be realized,” he said. “There’s a different editorial process in understanding if an idea is worth sharing. The work TEDMED is doing of critically assessing ideas is really important to change – and that’s generally absent in healthcare.”

““In a technocratic world people forget that relationships are at the core of complex systems.””

So Tamber did what any MD with a background in editing and technology would – he started a blog. The purpose was to mine the disconnect between health systems and communities. His own background influences his critique.

“I was acutely aware in medical school that they didn’t have a clue about what it means to come from a working-class environment,” he said. “They offer all this advice about better food, exercise, sleep – which isn’t practical for people in these situations. There’s a fundamental disconnect of healthcare with where people really are in their lives.”

Tamber’s focus and passion became trying to understand how a health system can work with local communities in difficult social circumstances. This started him on a quest to identify practitioners around the world who were “trying to do stuff.”

“I only wanted to talk to doers because it felt to me that public health and academia are filled with ideas but very few people who are actually doing anything,” he said. “All those people talking about it for years from the perspective of social justice and health equity and – so what? How do you actually do any of what they advocate?”

The 2016 Meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative.

If the community has no sense of control or purpose and no understanding of their own justice in society, Tamber challenges, why would they try to have a better life? What would be the point? “People take care of themselves because they have a sense of their future. If you don’t have a sense of your future, why would you care about health?”

It’s not without some disdain that Tamber evokes the example of people in health who talk about patients needing to go to the gym or the farmer’s market. He urges a different type of conversation. One that allowed people to define for themselves what health means. “If you allow that conversation to be authentic, you’ll find that health means things like safety, belonging, feeling connected, having access to opportunity. Diabetes usually isn’t the first thing they talk about.”

The question became: “How do you engage a community in their health when their very definition of health is different from yours and that of the health system?”

That work led to a series of interviews and meetings with select doers who he ended up calling the Creating Health Collaborative, an international group of innovators exploring health from the perspective of people and communities.

“The discourse in healthcare continues to be around virtual surgery, genotyping and sexy, tech-driven knowledge around health,” Tamber said. “People with power continue to dominate the discourse around health and people without power have no voice to say – ‘Can we just have a decent school for our kids?’”

“If you just say, ‘Hey fat person, stop being fat – it’s never going to work. But that’s my one-sentence explanation of what public health has become. It keeps kidding itself that technology is what’s going to change that. It’s still an information intervention, and they haven’t been working for four decades.”

Tamber hopes to flip that conversation with the first symposium of Bridging Health & Community – an event that will feature a diverse range of speakers from an urban planner to a political scientist to the father of social epidemiology. “There’s going to be no theory up there,” he said. “Everyone there has to illustrate practically a part of this work.”

“We continue to invest in technologies that don’t get to the communities we most need to reach and we haven’t shifted our thinking,” Tamber says. “Where is a forum for thinking in health? That’s why I created this.”

Bridging Health & Community’s Symposium, Community Agency & Health, takes place May 15-16 in Oakland, CA. To learn more and purchase tickets, go here: Community Agency and Health Symposium

"It enriches the experience of this crazy thing we all do"

Dr. Suzanne Koven

Dr. Suzanne Koven is writer-in-residence at Mass General

Ten years ago, Dr. Suzanne Koven started a reading group at Mass General for clinical and non-clinical staff. They read literature and poetry and met in the hospital cafeteria, discussing themes that touched on their everyday lives as people working in healthcare. “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene.

The group was wildly popular.

Today, Koven is writer-in-residence at Mass General, a position that is less unusual than it may first sound as the number of writers-in-resident at hospitals across the U.S. and in the UK gently swells. Some focus on working directly with patients to share their narrative journeys through expressive writing, but Koven’s focus is on caregivers. A body of research supports the health benefits of story telling for patients and practitioners alike.

A primary care physician with an MFA in non-fiction writing and a respectable writing career, Koven didn’t necessarily see the two careers fused. That changed after her division chief caught word of her reading group and the enthusiasm it was engendering with staff. He wanted more.

“He was very conscious of burnout and retention of physicians and employees and said to me, ‘Gee, it would be great if more people could experience this,’” Koven said. He tasked an employee in staff development to work with Koven on a plan – and the writer-in-residence position was born. Koven designed the position, coming up with three main focuses: (1) She would continue to do her own writing and develop a narrative voice in medicine much in the way of physicians who develop an academic voice; (2) she would take the concept of literature and “weaponize” it so she could take it into other practices during their regular meetings, while continuing to run her reading groups; and (3) she would mentor hospital staff interested in writing.

Koven found no shortage of aspiring writers in the halls of medicine, unsurprising considering the vibrant legacy of MD-writers such as Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Somerset Maugham and Walker Percy.

Koven’s first two-year term started two years ago, and was just renewed, as she continues to expand and improve her approach, while working with other institutions to bring literature more intimately and actively into the field.

“There’s a big appetite for this thing,” she said.  “When I started, one apprehension I had is that I thought it would be hard for me to explain what I was doing. But it turned out to be very easy to explain. It’s this longing to communicate and plumb issues of medicine through the refractive lens of literature. It turned out to be an easy sell.”

Koven says that the profession of medicine takes people who are socially apt and isolates them within very hierarchical structures and boundaries – and yet the everyday stories in medicine are rich with a pathos that begs to be shared. This tension creates a longing for connection and understanding that literature can mine.

“One of the insights I got from doing the reading group is that people are dying to talk,” she says. “And literature gives you permission to talk. Literature creates a safe space. It also helps with team building and breaking down barriers with groups in conflict. It’s a place to talk about things that are more than superficial.”

Koven chooses texts that draw out broader human themes then asks questions that invite people to speak from clinical and personal experiences. Participants talk about the book, but also parallels they might experience in their own lives and profession.

“It just enriches the experience of this crazy thing we all do, dealing with people in these very intense and emotional moments,” she says. “That’s been for me an exhilarating aspect of doing this work.”

If you’re interested in connecting with Dr. Koven or learning more about the reading groups and discussions she leads, go to www.suzannekoven.com 

In honor of the marriage of literature and medicine, we share this winning poem of the Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine, by Harvard poet and physician Rafael Campo.

Morbidity and Mortality Rounds

By Rafael Campo

Forgive me, body before me, for this.

Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooled

in how to touch: I meant to understand

what fever was, not love. Forgive me for

my stare, but when I look at you, I see

myself laid bare. Forgive me, body, for

what seems like calculation when I take

a breath before I cut you with my knife,

because the cancer has to be removed.

Forgive me for not telling you, but I’m

no poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgive

my gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—

you must not realize I just met death

again. Forgive me if I say he looked

impatient. Please, forgive me my despair,

which once seemed more like recompense. Forgive

my greed, forgive me for not having more

to give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:

for this apology, too late, for those

like me whose crimes might seem innocuous

and yet whose cruelty was obvious.

Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,

for my confusing heart that sounds so much

like yours. Forgive me for the night, when I

sleep too, beside you under the same moon.

Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,

for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,

for losing you, unable to forgive.

How The Better Lab Got Started

“The system was horribly broken – and I wanted to be a part of fixing it.”

Dr. Amanda Sammann presenting at the 2016 CMS Quality Conference.

She was on the trading floor when the first plane hit the first tower on 9/11. Then, the second tower was hit. Amanda Sammann was a new grad with a human biology degree from Stanford working a job in high yield bonds in New York City.

That day altered the path of her life.

“I remember walking by medical tents, seeing smoke rising, people covered with ashes, and thinking that I just wanted to be down there helping,” said Sammann, a trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Founder and Executive Director of The Better Lab, a venture that uses design to study and fix healthcare challenges.

Sammann had attended Stanford during the first dot-com boom, but was always drawn to medicine. She volunteered at Stanford Hospital and worked on a novel adolescent health website – but it was the late ‘90’s and HMO’s were taking over. “It just seemed like such a horrible time to go into medicine,” said Sammann.

But the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 stirred something in Sammann that brought her back to her earlier passion. She loved healthcare, and she needed to be a part of it.

“I realized that if I was going to go into medicine, I would not go quietly,” she said. “The system was horribly broken – and I wanted to be a part of fixing it.”

Each step along the way of that journey ended up contributing to Sammann’s vision and creation of The Better Lab and her commitment to being a force for positive change in health.

She began by getting her Master’s in Public Health from Columbia. “Medicine is focused on fixing each individual while public health focuses on the greater good for the whole,” Sammann explained. “I wanted to have that training as well as I entered medicine in a way that I hoped would be disruptive.”

While at Columbia, she focused on informatics and technology in large-scale health interventions. It was an exciting time to be in public health, post-9/11 and during the anthrax scare, when letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to five news media offices and two U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. “I realized we didn’t have good systems for surveillance and monitoring of wide-spread disease,” Sammann said. She finished her pre-med requirements, and went on to UCSF to earn her medical degree.

“I showed up the first day and said I wanted to be a surgeon, where do I start?”

“I needed to go to a place like that.”

But Sammann wasn’t satisfied with that role as it existed.

Medical School is four years long.  A lot of medical school training is undifferentiated until the end, Sammann said, which didn’t work for her. So she designed a series of electives to train medical students in surgical skills and studied the outcomes. She then created a system for students to assist with transplant donor runs to be an extra hand for the surgeons. She honed the idea of what she wanted, which included studying the process as well as the interventions so that others could learn and the work could be validated.

After medical school, surgical training takes 5 years, with 2 years of research at UCSF. Sammann wanted to use those 2 years to learn how to be innovative; to go from evolutionary change to revolutionary change. In order to do that, she felt she would have to leave the ivory tower of academia. Sammann remembers reading The Art of Innovation by IDEO’s Tom Kelley in the VA when she was on night call. Kelley, partner and co-founder of IDEO with his brother David Kelley, had built what many consider the greatest design and development company in the world – and an icon of disruptive innovation.

“I decided I needed to go to a place like that,” said Sammann.

And so she did. Sammann served as Medical Fellow and Medical Director at IDEO from 2011 to 2013, where she was immersed in the process of design thinking.

“It was the best professional experience

of my life.”

At IDEO, Sammann developed the creative confidence she needed to rethink how to approach healthcare, learning in a well-established and rigorous way the path to innovation. She had the opportunity to work with mentors such as Stacey Chang, now the Executive Director of the Design Institute for Health at UT’s Dell Medical School, and to see healthcare from a “360 degrees lens.” And she did human factors research, learning how to go about asking questions.

“The first time I interviewed a patient I went in like a bull in a china shop,” Sammann said, “asking questions like a surgeon: ‘Tell me this. Tell me that.’ Then I learned you get such richer information by actually just having a conversation with the patient: ‘Oh, what game is that you’re playing? Tell me about it.’”

“If you ask pointed questions, you’re not going to get to the unmet needs,” she added. “You’re going to confirm or reject your hypotheses – not get to the real issues.”

What Sammann also discovered was that every part of healthcare – from the CDC to academic institutions to private hospitals and device companies – all wanted to do that right thing. They all wanted to find ways to innovate and improve the system. But there was “a great chasm between the companies and institutions developing the devices and services and the people providing and receiving care.”

That’s when Sammann decided she wanted to start an in-house design firm at ZSFG where the process could be studied and iterated on to implement innovations – and to do it in an open-source way where information was shared. To make healthcare better in a collaborative way.

The Better Lab was born.

“'Better’ is good enough for now.”

Healthcare providers, Sammann believes, need to be a part of what the tech and device companies and architectural firms are building in health care to bridge the chasm that exists – and make things better.

Sammann says that “better” is important because without it our healthcare system is unsustainable. Without it, we can’t afford to provide the care we need.

“There’s so much waste,” she says. “We can do amazing things if we can improve the system. We need to be better.”

What exactly is “better”? “Better is good enough for now under these circumstances and in this context for this patient to provide quality, efficient care, with the knowledge that everything is going to change and that we constantly need to reassess and revise and adjust to new contexts and circumstances,” Sammann says.

The big challenge is creating a culture where you’re constantly iterating within a system that can’t shut down and reboot – to create a way of constant iteration without compromising a system that needs to be excellent 365 days of the year, 24 hours a day. Sammann says you do that by starting with low-risk, low-cost incremental changes, biting off small pieces that are manageable.  “Don’t try to overhaul the whole thing at once,” she says.

You also need buy-in from everyone participating or affected, finding ways to co-design solutions that come from users at every level.

“We need to build a better system together.”

Success means showing that human-centered design can work in healthcare to uncover opportunities and lead to innovative solutions. It also means marrying the design work with rigorous evaluation methods in order to study and publish research in a way that promotes wider learning in the field. And, it means figuring out a way to implement change swiftly and meaningfully in a dynamic system that can’t stop.

Sammann also wants to demystify healthcare by sharing the rich, human stories involved. To soften the boundaries of what is a very intimidating place where people go when they’re scared and confused – and to tell the stories of patients in a way that connects people to one another and deepens understanding.

“We need to break down the barriers between those who provide care, those who receive care, and those who support care,” says Sammann. “We need to build a better system together. All of us. Because we’re all part of it.”

If you’d like to collaborate or learn more about The Better Lab, contact lara@thebetterlab.org

In Good Hands

Their faces push forward through my dreams.

The young man who had been shot, his crooked-fixed stare both hard and scared. The woman who had been assaulted outside her apartment, a bright purple hematoma crowning her head. The hulking man, tattooed, with a wide red gash running vertically down the length of his leg like a sliced tenderloin.

I was rounding patients with the attending trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. In our group, were a 4th-year resident, a half-dozen medical students, and a couple of nurse practitioners – an early-dawn battalion at the only Level One Trauma Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you live in the Bay Area and get in a car crash, or get shot, or confront a medical emergency that rattles you deeply enough – this is where you come.

And on this day I am here, a shadow, watching you, and watching the people who are tasked with caring for you, struggling with my urge to kneel at each of your bedsides. I am learning that GSW means gun-shot wound, and MVC means motor vehicle crash. And I am learning this:

If you are that woman who was pulled from your car after a collision; as you lie flat on the gurney with your neck in a brace worrying frantically for your baby and the daughter who were with you in that car. If you are that woman alone in that room with your shivering heart and your now unfamiliar body – you may, or may not, remember this.

There is a surgeon who stops to listen to you. It’s near the end of her rounds, and the morning has been long, but she lays her hand on your shoulder. She looks you full in the face and says, “I know that you’re scared. This is scary. Your baby and your daughter are going to be OK, and we’re going to take good care of you.”

When the surgeon says these words, I feel a flood of relief and gratitude. I feel that I am you, and I no longer need to kneel at your bedside. I just hope that you will remember. I hope that you will remember that you are in good hands – hands born for this moment to carry you through.

This piece was first recorded and ran as a Perspective on KQED in San Francisco.

The Bloom of Blood and Tears

Dr. Amanda Samman’s Table Top hearts are on display at Macy’s Downtown through February 14. Check them out on the 3rd floor by the Geary Street escalators

If you live or hang out anywhere around San Francisco, you’ve seen the hearts. Big, beautiful hearts mounted throughout the city, each depicting a different image or pattern, each with a story to tell. Hearts in San Francisco is an annual public art installation started in 2004 by San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. Artists from around the world have painted the hearts, which are sold at an event benefitting the hospital each year. The project has raised more than $15 million for the hospital and its new trauma center.

This year, The Better Lab Founder Dr. Amanda Sammann has contributed a heart, and – all subjectivity aside – it’s super-cool. Yes – this is when you discover that Sammann, a trauma surgeon and Assistant Professor of general surgery at UCSF, has hands not only skilled in the art of saving lives, but in creating uniquely delightful expressions of her experiences.

Sammann started her medical career at San Francisco General in 2008, and it’s fair to say the place has a pretty fierce hold on her heart.

“It was such a powerful experience to go through internship and residency and such a labor of love. I wanted to create something indelible to commemorate the struggle of being a resident and to memorialize the patients we have the privilege of caring for,” she said.

The story of that personal and professional journey comes to life in Sammann’s tender and compelling work: a tabletop heart created from the medical notes she had written and saved for a decade about her patients during her residency, each sheet representing a list of tasks from a night or day on call. She folded each one into a paper flower. Sammann’s heart is a collage of these hand-folded flowers, called “Stem to Stern.” The term is a nickname for a large surgical incision, one often used in transplant surgery when you’re taking organs from donors, which Sammann says is “the ultimate gift.”

“I used to joke that if I ever quit surgery I was going to start a flower shop called ‘Stem to Stern,’” Sammann says. “You know, when the going gets tough. It all came around in this nice, tiny package – all the patient stories, all the blood and tears, to use for a hospital I love.”

The project coincided with Sammann’s return to San Francisco and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital from Oregon Health & Science University to serve as a first-year attending – and start The Better Lab.

“It was very nostalgic – just coming back, and I had a new baby,” she says. Sammann’s baby was 2-3 weeks old as she worked on the project. Her mom would rock her baby in a rocking chair, the baby would wake up, Sammann would nurse him, and then go back to folding the flowers over white floral wire – each carefully folded note a patient memory, which she placed in a bouquet in a glass vase.

“I actually remembered the patients from some of the notes, and what I was feeling at the time as a resident. The ones who were really sick. The saves. With each of those patients who were really dynamic I learned so much.”

The process, she said, was poetic as she returned to the institution where her career as a physician began.

“I was just thinking how lucky I am to be back here,” Sammann said of that process. “Of all the places I interviewed I wanted to come back here. I don’t think there’s any place like this, at least in the U.S.  – the patient population, staff that have been here for decades. It’s truly been like coming home.”

Dr. Amanda Sammann’s Table Top hearts are on display at Macy’s Downtown through February 14. Check them out on the 3rd floor by the Geary Street escalators.

The Hearts and Heroes luncheon takes place Thursday, Feb. 16, on the field of AT&T Park. You can read more and purchase tickets here.

The Innovative Healthcare Leader: Stanford's Hot New Exec Program

Dr. Sarah Soule, Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

One of the most valuable – and fun – learning experiences I’ve had was attending the Executive Program for Social Entrepreneurs at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Led by GSB professor Sarah Soule, it was an intensive week of study with 50 exceptional human beings from all over the world, fusing a traditional business curriculum with instruction in design thinking. I’m still in touch with many of my colleagues from #EPSE2014. (Go, changemakers!)

So, when I saw that Sarah Soule was leading an executive program for health care leaders along with noted physician and celebrated author Abraham Verghese, I was excited. The Innovative Health Care Leader: From Design Thinking to Personal Leadership is an academic partnership between Stanford’s schools of business and medicine. The program is unique in that it leverages design thinking methodology, which helps break down big problems into manageable steps making the whole process less overwhelming – and, frankly, a whole lot more engaging and fun.

As faculty directors, Soule and Verghese attend all sessions, lunches, and dinners as well as teach in the program.  In terms of strengths, Soule says, “Abraham is a world-renowned physician and author, and I have a great depth of experience in designing executive programs, as well as a deep knowledge of strategy and organizational design.” It’s a winning team.

The origin of the program, says Soule, came out of a desire to foster more collaboration across the seven schools of Stanford University, as well as from a general need for many healthcare leaders to have more training in business-related topics and innovation processes. Incorporating a human-centered approach addresses Verghese’s persistent question: “How do you deliver the ‘care’ in caring while still delivering cutting-edge science?”

It’s a question that feels critically urgent today. 

This focus on design thinking/human-centered design as well as the stress on innovation in the field more broadly are key differentiators for the Stanford program vis-à-vis other multi-day executive medical programs at top universities. This will be the program’s second year, and last year’s participants seem convinced. Said one: “This course is really about understanding what elements in your culture or perhaps even in your own personality or in your workplace are actually preventing you from allowing innovation to happen.”

And how does innovation happen? It’s a question with no shortage of experts and opiners.

With the popularity of Lean and other approaches to innovation being applied in healthcare, how does Soule see the role of design thinking playing out? “I am of the mind that these are complimentary approaches, that can be used very effectively together,” she says. She shares this opinion with her colleague, Stefanos Zenios, who sees design thinking as a methodology for identifying the user's need to create hypotheses then get qualitative feedback through prototyping, while Lean can provide a rigorous framework for many of these hyphotheses.

Recently, we heard the comment of one business professor from the East Coast that design thinking is “the assembly line of the 21st century.” It’s a pretty bold statement, and I wondered how Soule would regard the claim.

“I agree with this,” she said. “Design thinking, as you know, is not just about designing products; it is about changing mindsets and developing creative confidence in our people, and changing cultures of teams and organizations.  As well, it is a powerful problem-solving technique that is widely applicable.”

Knowing that, how could you resist the urge to learn more?

But if all that isn’t enticement enough, I have to say that the food served at the Stanford GSB executive program I attended was a pretty memorable perk. And, Soule says it’s even improved since then. The program Chef has made the food healthier, offering all kinds of items for special diets. Plus, participants are offered morning exercise with an instructor and pretty snazzy GSB jackets.

Interested? You still have time to apply. The deadline is Feb. 13.

You can learn more about the program here: The Innovative Healthcare Leader

Read Dr. Sarah Soule's Case Study on using Design Thinking at Huntington Hospital:  

Huntington Hospital: Empowering Staff

Things that opened our minds in 2016 ...

As the new year unfolds, we thought we'd jump in and share a few things that moved or enlightened us in some way. As inter-disciplinary thinkers, we love exploring different fields and mediums to see how our perspectives might be changed or expanded. With that in mind, here are a few things from Susan that opened her mind.

Waste Land, the documentary

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz goes to the largest land fill in the world and works with the garbage pickers to create an extraordinary art project that brings light and dignity to the people and their work. I was inspired by the journey of friendship, beauty and personal discovery that takes place over the course of the project. Honestly, don't miss this. It will reinforce your belief in humanity and goodness.

Richard Serra's Steel Sculpture "Sequence," at SFMOMA

If you live or are traveling anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area and haven't yet been to the newly redesigned SFMOMA – go. It is pure wonder and joy. There are so many things to see there that will make you rethink your understanding of art + space + life in general, but start with Richard Serra's monumental sculpture.

Looks like just a few looping masses, right? Don't be deceived. Walking around and through the maze-like structure will open your mind to how space defines your thoughts and feelings. Somehow, the structure wraps around you, womb-like, giving you a sense of both safety and awe. It was surprisingly peaceful and so aspirational that I walked away feeling taller and more alive.

This American Life, "The Sun Comes Up"

OK, I'll admit that after the November Presidential elections my household was a pretty sad place to be. It took a new puppy to shake us out of the despair. (Welcome to the family, Ivy.) But as an Independent who comes from a family of pretty staunch Midwestern Republicans, I'm always looking for the bridge. My fundamental belief that people are good occasionally gets knocked around, but it usually comes back stronger. This podcast from "This American Life" was the perfect antidote to my malaise, sharing powerful personal reflections from all sides of the political spectrum on the aftermath of the election. I listened to it while running and, well, I cried. Especially uplifting: The conversation between two guys who are long-time best friends with opposing political beliefs. Their discussion was smart, civil and genuine. Think of it as a palate cleanser, whatever your persuasion.