Hasta La Ideas

The official Design Observer report of the Aspen Design Summit group I was apart of is up, providing a great overview of the process and outcomes from the 3-day charrette. (Core77’s overall reflection piece by Doug Powell is [here](http://www.core77.com/blog/events/a_report_from_the_aspen_design_summit_by_doug_powell_15337.asp).) Huge shout-outs to my amazing team members Maggie Breslin, Jaan Elias, Tim Brown, Henry King, Carol McCall, Margeigh Novotny, Jay Parkinson, Barbara Spurrier, Gong Szeto, and Helen Walters. Here’s a little taste from the report:

Rather than being centered on the physician, the group envisioned that healthcare responsibilities would be distributed across a wider network. Austin.us would serve to refer individuals both toward the primary care team as well as from the primary-care team to other nodes of a community network.

Physician involvement in the network was deemed a crucial component of the association’s success. Currently, a physician’s time is frequently taken up with routine monitoring or reassurance of patients. These tasks could properly be accomplished at less costly nodes of the network, allowing the physician to practice “at the peak of their license.” Patients conventionally desired direct physician contact. Therefore, a physician’s reliance on the network should be explicit. For example, a physician could “prescribe” conversations with community health workers and/or volunteers as part of a given course of treatment, legitimizing the role of the community network. The physician’s new slogan might be, “The doctor will connect you now.”

In addition, the network would depend on paid community health workers who would monitor chronic conditions and act as patient advocates with physicians or help a given individual connect to other nodes of the network. While such an individual should have healthcare training, the group thought it was equally important that community health workers would have project management skills.

Besides the paid portions of the network, the design team imagined a network heavily dependent on volunteers from the community. Roles could include volunteer promoters (generalists, such as a pastor in Austin who routinely helped parishioners monitor heir blood pressure); volunteer promoters who are specialists (a grandmother, for example, who gives advice on parenting), or cancer survivors advising others on treatment; and supporters throughout the community.

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