Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The Business of Social Health and Well-being
When thinking about the future of health, it’s natural to look first at emerging technologies— indeed, part of this year’s Health Horizons research is going to focus on technological innovation. But looking at technology alone misses a big part of the picture. Social innovations, new systems people will use to improve well-being (some driven by technology but some not), are likely to transform health and well-being over the next decade.
Take for instance, True North, the clinic in Maine that accepts payment in the form of “time dollars” from the Portland Hour Exchange Program, an alternative currency program, in which an hour of labor of any sort, be it teaching music raking leaves, or even giving a medical examination, earns the worker a “time dollar,” which can be redeemed for an hour of labor of any sort. The clinic, accepts these time dollars, it says, as a way to preserve the dignity of low and no-income patients and help them get the most out of their treatment.
Tom Dahlborg, the executive director of True North, explained to NPR that when he worked in Medicaid, patients had an attitude of “'Oh, it's free care, so I don't really deserve that much anyways.' "
From the article:
[Dahlborg] says patients at True North who pay with time dollars are fully engaged.
"We'll hear from a landscaper [who] will say, 'I mowed five lawns in the last month so I could bring my children in to see your pediatric nurse practitioner. This darn well better be a good visit,' " Dahlborg says.
They certainly get a lengthy visit. Patients are allowed to spend up to an hour or more with their doctors.
"They're developing empathy and trust together, which by the way is in the Hippocratic oath, however most people see that as woo-woo stuff," he says.
"They don't just want to get just medical information from you, they want to get a spiritual background," Barth says. "It's not like, OK, what's your religion? But it's, 'OK, what does your life look like?' And as a result, I've learned how to negotiate my own health, which has been a huge value."
What’s most notable here from the IFTF perspective, is that this new health care payment system isn’t really about technology. My colleague Bradley Kreit has been exploring health finance, and found social innovation playing a big part there as well.
One example he’s been looking into is water.org's Water Credit, a microfinance initiative that gives loans to people across the globe to gain basic access to drinking water. While it’s not the traditional microfinance model of lending to entrepreneurs, it works on a similar principal. The same way that access to an oven and ingredients gives a baker the capacity to earn money to pay back a loan by making and selling pastries, Water Credit loans provides the borrower with clean water and, therefore, better health and more time (which would have been spent fetching water or incapacitated by illness)—and more time and better health increases the borrower’s capacity to earn money and pay back the loan.
This example is particularly interesting to Health Horizons because our research this year is going to focus on health innovations that will be enabled by the unprecedented amount of data we will have access to in the coming decade. This explosion of data will allow us to see previously invisible causes and correlations and then tailor interventions accordingly. In this way, new practices, services, and interventions will gain their legitimacy through technology, (data will provide evidence) but the interventions themselves won’t be tech dependent.