We tend to focus on disruption in technology, but we should notice a disruption in culture as well. This may sound strange coming from a person educated in engineering but I found that healthcare requires cultural disruption in order to fix healthcare as we know it … broken pieces to a consumer’s eyes.
Technology
Everyone loves technology and it surrounds us cradle to grave. Why not? Technology disruption creates opportunities, instability (catalyst for change), and perspective shifts in our thinking. The issue is that we tend to focus on technology disruption while ignoring the potential for cultural disruption. Technology disruption enables things to change using technology as a tool. Technology enablers include such things as mobility, devices (IoT), cloud, and analytics. They are very important and have led to great discoveries and cool tools such as smartphones and innovative medical devices. We design them based on usability standards and consumer needs. But, is that enough?
Wearables are gaining in popularity and also end up in your dresser draw in a few weeks or months once the novelty wears off. The reason we stop using them could be due to several reasons.
- Lack of usefulness – there is no health program attached to them so their value is limited to monitoring data – that can get boring quickly
- The coolness factor dissipated
- There is no consideration for cultural disruption and conversion
It is fine to offer cool technologies that have the potential to add value to our lifestyles, but if you want true sustainable engagement, cultural disruption must also occur.
Cultural Disruption
Cultural disruption focuses on our and the larger communities behaviors. Behavioral change can lead to sustainable shifts in what we do and how we act. Cultural enablers include social, community, personal behaviors, customer experience, and organizational behaviors. Cultural disruption can lead to sustainable change because it focuses on us, the consumers and our surrounding community. Our inner core being must be touched in order to make and keep a change in our behavior. We look to other people as influencers to help us with decision-making and on what we adopt. Localization has a strong impact on health programs. Health care is personal and local programs tend to work better than pushed remote, corporate programs because they deal with the cultural aspect of our lives that reside in our homes and community. Cultural disruption can help consumers manage chronic diseases by altering their perspective on their health and in decision-making behaviors.
Cultural disruption causes a shift in our thinking and expectations. It also sets up new internal rules for us to follow. From this disruption, we may decide to integrate something into our lifestyle, decide what we focus on, or behave in a different way. If we want to make a change in how we manage our health, a wearable device by itself is not enough. We need cultural disruption to occur.
Apple did it
Steve Jobs performed cultural disruption very well with his innovative mobile products and those products were more about cultural change than they were about technology. That technology had been around a while, but Jobs focused on how it would impact our lifestyle, particularly around entertainment.
Disruption in Healthcare
Health care needs to focus on cultural disruption and continue to make advances in the areas of technology. Technology alone will not make a sustainable difference. Businesses allocate large budgets on IT and they should think about allocating resources around culture as it impacts their organization and products. Technology disruption must be aligned with a cultural disruption to make a difference in consumer engagement or any engagement for that matter. We need more cultural disruption in all industries.