Of Real and Virtual People

I was reading an article from last week’s Wall Street Journal titled, “The Myth of Prevention” by Abraham Verghese, MD. The bulk of the article focused on health reform and the specter of phantom savings derived from a greater focus on prevention. Specifically, more screenings find more diseases, get more patients on more drugs and the economics of how, as awful as it might be to say, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on new care spawned of “prevention” may not really return high numbers of years or lives saved; begging the question, is all that prevention delivering real health system value or will it actually drive costs up with little return?

A fascinating economics-ethics debate for sure. But not today.

For today, however is a discussion that Dr. Verghese sparks near the end of the piece. “[The EMR will] ensure that we doctors, nurses, therapists, particularly in hospitals will be spending more and more time focused on the computer, communicating with each other, ordering and getting tests, buffing and caring for our virtual patient—the iPatient is my term for this phenomenon—while the patient in the bed wonders where everybody is.”

He continues, “I have felt for some time that the patient in the bed has become an icon for the real focus of our attention, the iPatient.”

This intrigues me. Computers are about data, and the “insights” that data can deliver. I am knee deep in a digital project right now, awash in all the conversation/debate about what is measurable and what is trackable – connectable and projectable to some form of real or modeled ROI. The inherent data-collectability of digital activities, be they website clicks, ad views, drugs prescribed, or digital x-rays reviewed very well may be distracting us from the humanity and reality of what we do as providers, planners, marketers, communicators and strategists.

Or to Dr. Verghese’s point, are our tools shifting our focus from the human to the digital representations of the human – their medical data, the data about their behaviors in digital space, their purchase data, their attitudinal data?

An extension of the iPatient is the iConsumer. We’re guilty of this in marketing communications—boiling people down to numerical representations of the larger population’s humanity.

I can’t say that I have a pointed opinion or conclusion to offer here, other than to wonder when the last time was one of us sat down with a real patient and listened to their story. Not for the purpose of collecting data about who they think is “best” or “most preferred” or how they engaged the internet in tackling their health condition or whether a ad made them trust a hospital more or less, but rather just listened to the reality of confronting disease and what’s needed to find peace of mind within a disorganized network of care providers. While your customers should never develop your strategy for you, they certainly inform your planning.

Maybe that’s the difference between “research” and “listening.” In research we have a goal in mind. We ultimately want the target to either confirm our suspicions (brilliance) or report our effectiveness in influencing their rational thinking to our point of view. In listening we should have no agenda for what they are to give us, other than connecting in real, human terms. Sure, compile enough connections and the inquisitive mind can craft correlations, conclusions and relations. Even insights.

As we rush forward, in policy around reform, in strategy responding to changing technologies, economies and care delivery models, in communications marshalling the unrivaled power of digital mediums, tools and all the data they can spew at us, perhaps we should all make a concentrated effort to talk to, and listen to humans.