Marie Kondo And Digital Health

The Japanese art of decluttering and tidying up could show medical professionals what they could get rid of in healthcare so the surroundings of patients and care processes could become agreeable. Here, the aim is not to “spark joy” but to make all the activities in healthcare invisible and seamless – no waiting times, no (necessary) medical visits, less administration – to cause as little concern to patients as possible. Let’s see how digital health could help make medicine neat!

A fragile Japanese woman and the art of tidying up

After Netflix introduced its latest reality show about Marie Kondo, the cute Japanese fairy entering messy U.S. households and helping their inhabitants on their journey to decluttering and tidying their homes, the KonMari method swept through the entire universe, it seems. Of course, the show had great timing – at the beginning of the year people are eager to bring change in their lives – but its rising popularity also shows a human need much deeper than that. If we believe in the philosophy that our environments, our “outsides” reflect on the processes within ourselves on the “insides”, then these simple efforts towards domestic order also mirror our wishes for simplicity, transparency, and tidiness in ourselves in general.

When Marie Kondo says that we have to take our clothes, books, papers, personal belongings out of the drawers, and only keep the ones that “spark joy”, she encourages us to examine our surroundings with a fresh eye and be more mindful to the material things that support our daily life.

Healthcare doesn’t spark joy

What could Marie Kondo bring to healthcare? Could her philosophy be applied anywhere in the medical arena? That’s not inevitable at first, but the general idea of transparency, simplicity and clear processes could be used anywhere.

When you have pain in your stomach, when you cannot lift your arm, when you feel dizzy, you want to end up in a place that will heal you as fast as possible, and you want to be in the hands of people who will treat your case with utmost professionalism and empathy. However, most of the times, something goes haywire. For a starter, you have to wait for hours to get to a doctor – or even weeks, if you want to secure an appointment at a specific physician -, then you have some medication with side effects, perhaps a painful operation and an unpleasant recovery.

So, what if Marie Kondo asked us to throw out the clutter from healthcare? What would you throw out to have a more pleasant patient journey and a more viable working environment for physicians?

1) Cut back on waiting times

The first and most annoying phenomenon in healthcare is waiting. You have to wait for the doctor, for your X-ray and CT scan, for the medication or the follow-up appointment. In a Hungarian hospital, patients had to wait 196 days (I repeat it: 196 days!) from the discovery of a cancerous tumor until the oncology team session decided about treatment before they introduced a new patient management system.

Since the introduction of special software and optimization of patient management practices in November 2015, in the Hungarian county of Kaposvár, the average time from the discovery of a cancerous disease until the actual medical consultation about the treatment plan has been reduced drastically from 54 to 21 days. Those 33 days could mean the difference between life and death. These really were just simple steps of following up with patients – calling them to ask how they were and asking them about whether or not they will show up at their appointments – and straightforward instructions on how to behave the most empathetic way possible. The method of carefully examining patient pathways, paying more attention to the details, identifying the pain points and acting on them by introducing “patient management assistants” who follow up with patients, as well as doctors on individual cases, could easily be applied elsewhere, too.

2) Cut back on medical visits

What if you could avoid going to the doctor altogether and cut out the entire unpleasant experience from your life? That’s what telemedicine and chatbots will offer patients in the future. For example, these talking or texting smart algorithms might become the first contact point for primary care. Patients will not get in touch with physicians or nurses or any medical professional with every one of their health questions but will turn to chatbots first. If the little medical helper could not comfortably respond to the raised issues, it will transfer the case to a real-life doctor.

And even in that case, the patient might stay in the comfort of their home – with the help of telemedicine. In remote areas and regions with scarce medical human resources, the ability to call a doctor on Skype or any other online service will be a game-changer.

3) Less administration

Statistics have found that half of the physicians’ average workdays are spent entering data into EHRs and conducting clerical work, while just 27 percent is spent with actual patients. Administrative work does seem to be clutter. For most of the people, doing paperwork does not spark joy – it gives you the satisfaction of easy, mindless and achievable work with guaranteed success, but it will genuinely not spark joy. So, what can we do to lessen the medical community’s administrative burden?

We should let artificial intelligence undertake these mindless tasks. Repetitive, monotonous assignments without the slightest need for creativity could and should be done by artificial intelligence in the future. For example, as in the brilliant movie, Her, cognitive assistants could prioritise e-mails in doctors’ inboxes or keep them up-to-date with the help of finding the latest and most relevant scientific studies in seconds.

4) Small and sleek digital technologies instead of big, chunky devices

Look at how much weight the ECG device lost during its evolution! The invention of the ECG is usually associated with Dutch physician, Willem Einthoven, who first coined the term „electrocardiogram” and built a new kind of string galvanometer with very high sensitivity. His device weighed 600 pounds. Later, Frank Sanborn’s company produced the first portable version of the electrocardiogram in 1928. It weighed 50 pounds and was powered by a 6-volt automobile battery.

And now, peek at the Kardia Alivecor ECG devices! They fit into our palms and weigh less than one pound. Gadgets have become smaller, more comfortable and more efficient. And there was even an evolution of the various versions of Alivecor devices! For example, the first version of their FDA-approved, medical-grade ECG recorder only works on the iPhone 5; the next generation was already thinner and more sophisticated. The latest version is just a little bit thicker than your credit card. With the transformation of huge, chunky devices into pocket-sized digital equipment, the hospital environment becomes more friendly and more transparent for both patient and doctors – while measuring the same parameters and vital signs with the same accuracy.

Digital technologies could help make patients the point-of-care for diagnostics, bring healthcare from a proactive to a preventive field, provide personalized care for the people not for populations. By arriving at this stage, healthcare would become invisible in practice, and people would only feel its presence when there is genuinely a need for it – meaning a preventive measure to avoid a full-blown disease or an immediate intervention in case of urgency. That’s how we imagine extensive decluttering and tidying in healthcare would look. What would your “KonMari moment in medicine” look like?